In the past day or two on social media I kept seeing this graph from a Semafor story on the declining volume of international visitors to the United States.
Semafor Graph.
It seems to show, and was being remarked on as showing, that the second Trump administration has been responsible for a drop in visitors from abroad from some countries on a scale comparable to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. My first thought was “that can’t be true”. And indeed it is not true. I mean, the pandemic shut down air travel almost completely for a while. The current administration’s actions have been terrible in many ways and led to direct, negative consequences for tourism, too. But they haven’t been on that scale. Something’s wrong with the graph.