European tourism to America is in steep decline, averaging about 25 percent for seven major countries. Since I live in France, I was particularly interested in French tourism to America. It has declined by about 20 percent, according to this article in Le Monde. This article is in English, but you can only read the first two paragraphs without a subscription.
The decline in European tourism is almost completely due to the hatred generated by Donald Trump against Europe. It is a pattern all to familiar, when Canadians largely stopped coming to American ski resorts after Trump threatened to annex Canada. He had no serious intention to do so, but he caused billions of dollars in lost revenue just by spouting off his hatred.
The decline has also resulted from safety concerns. Europeans, quite frankly, are afraid of getting shot if they visit America. My son-in-law, when he moved to America to marry my daughter, said he had checked on the figures before coming, and he was fifty times more likely to be shot in America than in France. While this may not appreciably increase a tourist’s risks, everyone keeps hearing about American mass public shootings. They happen almost every weekend. The news on December 14 was of a public shooting at Brown University. The previous week it was Kentucky State University. After this happens enough times, European minds begin linking the thought of visiting America to the fear of getting shot.
And I honestly cannot tell them otherwise. In one of my French classes, we read a passage in which a (fictitious) French woman dreamed of moving to America. I had to say, « Pour quoi est-ce qu’elle aimerait habiter en Amérique ? Les États-Unis ont tant de fusillades!» Why would she want to live in America ? The U.S. has so many shootings!
This is a science blog, so I will make a connection to evolution. Throughout human evolutionary history, migrating to a new location has given immense fitness advantages to many people and to their tribes. There has always been a risk, but the risk has been worth it. But today, visiting another country has risks without much benefit. Natural selection may have favored wanderlust in the past but today it provides no benefit. Why buy a plane ticket to America when you can hop on a train and visit Spain or Italy?
Trump has tried to compensate for the loss of agricultural sales (from his tariffs) by paying farmers. This is a big government approach. His big government ruins business then compensates for it by a socialistic payout. But is Trump going to offer a big payout to the tourism industry in return, not for tariff payments, but merely for the personal pleasure of insulting Europe? Just how many billions of dollars is America willing to lose to pay for Trump’s peevish insults?
I’d better post this pretty soon before we have another mass public shooting.
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