How Trump's Travel Crackdown Is Hurting Americans at Home and Abroad

This is part of Reason's 2025 summer travel issue. Click here to read the rest of the issue.

As the Trump administration began snatching college students, detaining legal European tourists, denying entry to British crust-punks, rejecting transgender passports, deporting tattooed Salvadorans, insulting the sovereignty of Canadians, and floating plans to ban visitors from 43 countries, the domestic travel and tourism industry braced itself for bad news.

"Historical data underscores that trade and geopolitical tensions influence travel demand," warned the research firm Tourism Economics in late February. The group had previously estimated that inbound visits to the U.S. in 2025 would rise 8.8 percent over last year; now it was forecasting a 5.1 percent drop. What's more, inbound travel spending this year "could fall by 12.3 [percent], amounting to a $22 billion annual loss."

Sure enough, the year-over-year foreign visitor numbers in March were brutal. Down a jaw-dropping 18.4 percent, they were led by a sharp drop-off from America's No. 1 supplier: Canada.

Then came President Donald Trump's 11th week in office. On April 2, the populist president capped a lifelong enthusiasm for tariffs ("the most beautiful word in the dictionary," he has said on multiple occasions) by announcing import taxes that averaged 22 percent, the largest ratchet in U.S. history.

The move came as a triple whammy to America's globe-leading $200 billion travel and tourism industry. First, as the luxury travel agent Kate Sullivan told TravelPulse, "the cost of hard goods will increase for hotels, airlines, and other industry sectors, who will likely need to increase rates and fares to cover the increases." Second, the disruptions to the global trading system will hit especially hard some of the fastest-growing sources of U.S. visitation—China, India, and Japan. And finally, the concomitant souring of overseas public opinion, particularly in regions (Scandinavia, Southeast Asia, North America) singled out for criticism by the Trump administration, is already depressing numbers. "The U.S. is not perceived as a welcoming destination," travel agency owner Marco Jahn told the Associated Press after the tariffs were announced.

Americans whose incomes are not tethered to the enthusiasms of overseas visitors may have the impression that such industry turmoil will leave their own travel plans unscathed. Alas, they are mistaken.

For starters, domestic hoteliers are heavily reliant on imports for furniture, especially from high-tariffed China and Vietnam. Trump's own hotels are filled with foreign-made dishware, chandeliers, and even American flags.

Making goods more expensive immediately reduces Americans' discretionary spending, which is the bucket from which travel budgets are drawn. Recessions decrease vacations, sometimes sharply; after Trump's tariffs, most of the major economic forecasting agencies (Moody's, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morningstar) jacked up their expectations for an economic downturn. Consumer confidence also tracks closely with travel planning; the former was at a four-year low even before "Liberation Day" tariffs. Further losses in the stock market—as of press time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has dropped 3 percent since Inauguration Day—would also depress demand.

It gets worse for the American traveler. Over the decades, the dollar has been propped up by Washington's leadership role in global tariff reduction; now that those tables have been turned, the greenback will be less desirable as the world's backstop currency, placing downward pressure on its value (particularly if America's heretofore world-beating economy begins to sputter). The dollar in Trump's first four months slid 7 percent against the euro.

American bookings to the now-more-expensive overseas were already down 13 percent this year before Trump's tariffs. It's not just cost: A mid-March Travel Weekly survey of 400 agents found that 59 percent had heard customer concern about anti-American sentiment abroad, with 22 percent reporting resultant cancellations. A YouGov poll in early March showed that not a single European country surveyed had a net positive view of the U.S., with favorability plummeting between 6 and 28 percentage points over the previous quarter. "In Great Britain, Denmark, Sweden, Spain and Italy, these are the lowest figures…since we began tracking this question," the pollster wrote.

So Americans will be traveling domestically, right? Not so fast. Starting on May 7, a whole 17 years after it was originally supposed to happen, Americans are no longer allowed to board a commercial flight unless using a REAL ID. Except Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said, "If it's not compliant, they may be diverted to a different line, have an extra step, but people will be allowed to fly." As of April, the Transportation Security Administration was reporting that 19 percent of current travelers were passing through checkpoints without Real ID–compliant documents.

That's one "papers, please" hassle; another has the potential to affect citizens who don't even board a plane. Amid his Day 1 blizzard of executive orders, Trump signed the ominous-sounding Protecting the American People Against Invasion executive order, requiring foreigners of all nationalities to register with and get fingerprinted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) within 30 days of being in the country, unless they are exempted by a preexisting visa. Aimed at (and interpreted as) cracking down on resident illegal aliens, the order also affects the millions of Canadians who until now have been allowed to travel visa-free into the U.S. for up to six months.

What does this have to do with U.S. citizens? Enforcement. As of April 11, according to the DHS' final rule, "An alien's willful failure or refusal to apply to register or to be fingerprinted is punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 or imprisonment for up to six months, or both." Registered aliens "must at all times carry and have in their personal possession any certificate of alien registration or alien registration receipt card," or else face a $5,000 fine or 30 days in jail. How does law enforcement determine that a human who either does not have or refuses to show identification is actually an alien? This will surely be tested in court.

Not being fully free to move about the country is, regrettably, a condition that most Americans have already been living with, in the form of Immigration and Customs Enforcement roadside checkpoints within 100 miles of international borders (a zone that covers two-thirds of the population). And for 99 percent of us, coughing up documentation we were already carrying is a low-impact inconvenience.

But millions of Americans this year will still travel in foreign lands, where they are likely to run into an iron rule of international relations: What we do to foreigners, foreigners are eventually going to do to us. Right now, U.S. passport holders can visit most of the world's countries without a visa or with a visa on arrival for up to 90 days. If the DHS gets into the habit of detaining and fingerprinting Europeans after their 30th day of vacation, you can expect that liberalism to constrict.

There is precedent. In 2009, as a result of the 9/11 terror attacks, the U.S. created the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, requiring extra fees, wait times, probing questions, and machine-readable passports of visitors even from the now-43 countries in the Visa Waiver Program. The European Union responded with the European Travel Information and Authorization System, which would have been instituted years ago had Eurocrats developed technological competence in the meantime. (Current D-Day estimates are for the end of 2026.)

The era of permissionless and comparatively anonymous travel is over. Trade wars are making international exchange more expensive and less fun. And even those of us who choose America and stay off planes may find ourselves asked to prove our legal status to a man with a gun. The past was another country indeed, one that many of us wish we could still visit.