International tourism increasing globally, decreasing in the U.S.

An interesting article in The Christian Science Monitor reports that, in spite of the continued decline of the U.S. dollar, foreign tourism has dropped by two-million visitors in the U.S. while simultaneously rising globally by thirty-five million since 2000¹.

This raises the obvious question of what is responsible for this decline in foreign visits. Could it be those stories of U.S. government agents kidnapping travellers from our airports, whisking them off to be tortured in Egypt, Syria or some other country and then holding them indefinitely and incommunicado in a roughly two-by-three metre cell? Perhaps the growing international perception of insufferable jingoism among U.S. citizens is the factor pushing visitors away from our amber waves of grain.

According to the report, the poorly implemented security procedures and an increasingly negative perception of the United States are two of the primary reasons why visits to the U.S. seem to be dropping. A third factor mentioned is that the U.S. has no international tourism promotion programme, although this factor does not really explain why tourism is decreasing (i.e. the U.S. never had such a programme, so if such an absence were the cause, tourism would have been decreasing steadily).

From an economic standpoint, the lost tourist revenue represents approximately a one-hundred fifty billion dollar loss to the U.S. economy. This follows the news yesterday that the Bush Administration will manage to break yet another record by presenting the next president with an estimated four-hundred eighty-two billion dollar deficit. It really does raise an interesting question: What exactly are the self-proclaimed conservatives in the present administration trying to conserve?