A few days ago, alarm rang in the orgy of Trump’s global tariffs that fewer tourists were travelling to the US. What these reports ignored was that tourism to Europe was down too.

On April 12 2025 the, lately, less than erudite UK Guardian ran the headline, “‘I’m super worried’: fewer UK tourists visiting US amid Trump’s policies and rhetoric”.

On April 16 alongside outlets like Atlantic, Axios ran with the more direct, “Tourism to America is under threat”.

Just two days ago NBC News jumped in with a little more nuance: “As international tourists pull back on U.S. travel and purchases, $90 billion in lost revenue looms. Visits from Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom have seen particularly significant declines”.

NBC’s source was Goldman Sachs.

And Canada’s CBC ran two days before NBC, “‘I don’t blame you’: U.S. tourism hot spots mourn Canadian travel cancellations”.

Canada would be the main protagonist as this story played out.

You see, tourism wasn’t just down in the US. In Ireland and the UK too, people had stopped coming, and this had nothing to do with Trump.

Quickly forgotten was the news from Ireland reported in the Irish Times on March 28 2025 headlined: “Tourist slump deepens with 30% fall in visitors and €88m revenue loss. Central Statistics Office says February decline represents ‘acceleration’ of downward trend”.

And in Starmer’s Britain, the Independent on April 7 ran, “’The government just doesn’t get tourism’: VisitBritain chief outlines dismay with budget cuts. Exclusive: Nick de Bois warns action is needed to ‘arrest the decline’ in the UK’s share of tourists”.

So what’s really going on here?

It’s not tariffs

On January 27 2025, shortly after taking office, Trump threatened to annex Canada. On February 1 his White House then announced a 10% tariff on Canadian goods into the US. Canada it seemed didn’t have a sense of humour. Footage from Canada showed bottle shops pulling Jack Daniels off their shelves. Canadians, it seems, then vowed to stop visiting Niagara Falls from the US side.

Yet, how does this explain the drop in tourism to the US from Europe too? Here’s the truly fun part.

Roughly four days after taking office Trump began what Times of India headlined as, the “Largest deportation operation in history: Trump administration arrests, deports hundreds of ‘illegal immigrants’ in a day”.

Indeed, on Inauguration Day, one of Trump’s first acts was to declare that the US was “under invasion” from its southern border and therefore the President proclaimed that:

“The Secretary of Homeland Security, in coordination with the Secretary of State and the Attorney General, shall take all appropriate action to repel, repatriate, or remove any alien engaged in the invasion across the southern border of the United States”.

Today, the US Marine Corps patrols that land.

Early April Trump then extended this focus to general tourism, as the website Business Travel Europe ran: “Travelling to the US? Expect to be ‘vetted to the maximum degree’”.

It quoted “the unpredictability of US entry procedures … deportation or detention, heightened scrutiny of dual nationals, members of the LGBTQ+ community and those who have voiced political opinions on social media”.

It mentioned the recent deportation of an Australian, a French academic, a Costa Rican Nobel Peace Prize winner and “European Commission officials being equipped with ‘burner’ phones and scrubbed laptops to avoid sensitive information being extracted”.

What these reports failed to divulge was that the need to declare social media accounts and give access to phones and computers, had been a US entry requirement for over a decade. This was an Obama policy.

Trump’s focus, however, was on stopping and deporting terrorists, their sympathisers and rounding up political anarchists much as those active across US college campuses.

What’s the funny bit then? Well, if that was too much for Leftist Europeans, they should definitely stay away.

But tourism to Europe is falling too.

Ireland’s new troubles culminated on December 18 2024 when Israel in protest closed its embassy in Dublin as the Irish parliament declared its solidarity with Hamas.

Since October 2023, Ireland had been a cesspool of antisemitism. Only the daily social media coming from the UK showed a societal decline more worrying.

By March 2025 tourism to the emerald isle had dropped 30%. I know of none eager to travel to the UK given its now infamous reputation for “two-tier” pro-Islamist policing, and the constant anti-UK marches that consume London’s streets. As both Ireland and the UK have learned, Free Palestine is not a tourist magnet.

It’s also about economics

As a once regular traveller to the US loving its great retail, food, sights and my Red Sox, I’ve not been back for over a decade now. That of course pre-dated Trump.

It’s here that we enter the realm of exchange rates.

Back in the years following the Global Financial Crisis, my country Australia had parity with the greenback. US travel was a no brainer. Australia has since been trading at 60-70 cents to the US dollar and tourism just stopped being profitable. Add to that, the physical and economic impact of the Covid pandemic, and my interest just stopped.

This is not to say that the imposition of new tariffs hasn’t worsened my chances of visiting the US, given how poorly run the Australian economy now is. It has.

The Aussie Dollar dipped below US 60 cents last week as the S&P 500 crashed. Nonetheless, this isn’t just tariffs. Local political leadership matters too.

The world is justified to moan about the economic earthquake that Trump is attempting in returning manufacturing to the US. The question is, why aren’t Canada, Europe and Australia positioned to stand up to China as well?

It all boils down to this

Globalisation and the social impact of unelected international political entities such as the EU and UN have wreaked havoc across the West.

Spurred by Merkel’s Germany, and funded by Iran, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, they have opened the door to a tsunami of worldwide illegal Islamist immigration following the failed Arab Spring. Both are responsible for today’s unrestrained antisemitism masked as anti-Zionism. Both are responsible for the very hubris that brought mass-horror from Hamas to Israel on October 7 2023. Both are responsible for inspiring the downfall of mainstream journalistic integrity.

More worryingly, both have spawned the blatant discrimination now tarnishing humanitarian organisations like Red Cross and Amnesty International.

The United States remains the world’s last superpower—albeit one hugely in debt, and hugely indebted to China. So, Trump isn’t trying to change the world order with tariffs and the eradication of illegal immigration.

He’s seeking to redefine the notion of what being a superpower is.

If Europe, Canada and Australia have the resources to support illegal immigration and ply the Palestinian cause at a time when the notion of what “Palestine” is has never been more vague, then they have the resources to takeover other causes the US has previously funded for them.

If that also means these countries are awash with citizenry who can’t pass muster at a US point of entry, they need to clean their own backyards too.

Are tariffs sane? Well, we could argue that they’re definitely not capitalist. Therein lies the lesson.

If countries forget to push their comparative advantage and then complain when caught being uncompetitive—if countries find that they’ve sold their national values for the votes of terrorists, then they need to rediscover their souls. For these countries will always be up for exploitation.

© 2025 Adam Parker.

Picture credit: © 2025 Adam Parker.