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Not living in reality? Okay. How much are you willing to bet that you are living in reality, and I am not? Let's set the terms to whether 2025 will have less visitors to the US than an average of 2021-2023. If you disagree with those terms for not decoupling a chilling effect from broader trends, then explain how you intend to decouple both effects to measure them otherwise and, if I think the method is viable, we can bet on those instead.
Just to update you on this bet, Las Vegas (the city that it's easiest to get tourist data for, until we get total numbers at year's end) has had fewer visitors in 2025 than 2023, an astonishing fact when you consider the earth's population has grown hundreds of millions over that time period.
Here's the source for the numbers
3.5 mil in 2023: https://news3lv.com/news/local/las-vegas-hits-highest-july-tourism-number-since-pre-pandemic-with-35m-visitors
3.1 mil in 2025: https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/vegas-tourism-is-down-some-blame-trumps-tariffs-and-immigration-crackdown
My understanding is that a drop in Canadian tourism has hit northern cities the most, unlike relatively isolated Las Vegas.
To decouple the chilling effect from the desire not to travel during a pandemic is quite simple, just compare the total decline to the specific decline in places with legal restrictions, the difference will tell you approximately how many people didn't travel because they were banned, and how many didn't travel because they were afraid of the deadly global pandemic. A good example seems to be Egypt, a country that is a tourist destination, centrally located, and had very light corona virus requirements (Between August 15th 2021 and June 16th 2022 you just had to show a negative test within the 3 days before arrival). You can see the numbers drop off a fucking cliff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_Egypt#Statistics
The same is true in Mexico, a country that apparently (correct me if I'm wrong) had zero corona virus travel rules: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_Mexico#Statistics
Based on this data it seems virtually impossible that you can attribute the massive drop off of tourism to a chilling effect, but we know that since last year the Trump border stuff is leading to a 10-20% decline.
There's a reason I selected average of 2021 to 2023 as the criteria. We skip 2020 because the Biden admin was not in charge then, so we include the remaining 3 years where pandemic-excused policies were relevant to tourists, though by 2023 they were pretty weak but not entirely absent.
You're welcome to provide data for the average of 2021 to 2023 against 2025 for Vegas.
Regardless, I specified "Visitors to the US" because the initial discussion was about international tourism, and "Visitors to Vegas" is a poor proxy for this because of domestic tourism. Most numbers I could find on the percentage of visitors to Vegas that are domestic tourists puts it somewhere between 70% and 80%.
"Afraid of the deadly global pandemic" is not something independent of government policy, but instead the product of government policy. If a government makes people afraid to travel by telling them covid will kill them if they do, that's still the government's fault.
This is something we could agree on, but probably won't: The chilling effect of both covid restrictions and ICE deportations is the direct result of government policy, not something that happens without. Yet for some reason you think the chilling effect of covid restrictions is merely an organic "desire not to travel".
Not a comprehensive account of tourism restrictions, you need to also consider domestic restrictions that would affect the activities that tourists can do once in the country.
But regardless, we can use your method, with the actual source Wikipedia is using for these graphs.
Egypt's numbers as a percentage of 2019 visitors: 2020: 28% 2021: 62% 2022: 90%
Mexico's numbers as a percentage of 2019 visitors: 2020: 55% 2021: 71% 2022: 85%
Australia will be an example of an extreme restriction country. Numbers as a percentage of 2019 visitors via this dataset as OWID is incomplete: 2020: 19% 2021: 3% 2022: 39%
That some countries had returned to 90% of 2019 tourism numbers by 2022, while Australia remains down at 39%, strongly suggests that the overwhelming majority of the decline in tourism can be attributed to government policy. If the decline in tourism was instead mainly due to fear of covid, then tourists would have no reason to continue visiting Egypt while refusing to visit Australia.
I think you're completely off mark here and I will make the strongest version of the argument. People travel less to places when they perceive a danger, even if the danger wasn't presented to them by any policy or authorities. It seems trivially obvious to me that people can be afraid of things based on their own judgment, you seem to disagree. As a rough stand in for "People's unwillingness to go do things during a pandemic" you can look at the sharp decrease of domestic economic activity in Feb/March 2020 before almost any policies were in place. Furthermore cutting out 2020 because "Biden wasn't in charge yet" when 2020 had by far the lowest amount of travel and activity (and Trump was in charge for the entire calendar year), again showing that this activity is not steered entirely by the chilling effect of the government (Remember at this time Trump was saying the risk was really really low, it might miraculously disappear, and that most cases would heal in a day).
The fact that 70-80% of visitors to Las Vegas are domestic strengthens my point even if you don't yet realize it. The dropoff of 10-15% suggests that 50% of all travel from foreign visitors has been curtailed by these chilling effects - much more than even the most generous example you can find of vaccine rules.
You can A/B test this with the similar drop off of tourism to SEA during the 2002 SARS outbreak. The dropoff was about 40% despite no Coronavirus-like restrictions in place. The best I can find are some local quarantine orders in Beijing - who knows if they were followed or enforced - as well as Travel Advisories, the same kind which exist for like 70% of countries but don't have any real effect on travel because nobody cares about some government suggestion, they care about their own judgement and safety.
If you have an argument to make then make it.
The danger was presented to them by policy and authorities because the prevalence of covid is effectively invisible to the average person in the absence of being told about it by authorities. What exactly would someone notice, absent being told, that would inform them that covid was around and uniquely dangerous? Approximately nothing. They'd notice people getting colds, as people always do, and old people dying at a fairly similar rate to what old people died at a decade or two ago, and short of carrying out their own far-reaching statistical survey on death rates they'd have no idea anything was amiss. This is roughly what happened in the Flu pandemics of the 50s and 60s - nobody really cared because there's no particular reason you'd notice an elevated risk.
This is hardly some tourists notice everyone who visits X mysteriously comes back in a body bag and therefore stop visiting X. There really is no danger that a layman would be able to detect were it not for authorities insisting there was a danger.
Not a good way to define it as we have been in a pandemic since some time in the 1980s.
I thought I had explained this clearly enough, but to try to explain this again: The reason I have cut it out is because the initial dispute is that I believe Biden's actions during covid have done more damage to tourism than Trump's actions on immigration. Therefore, including Trump's actions during covid as part of Biden's actions would be unfair to Biden.
No, unless you have evidence that the dropoff is all foreign visitors.
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You're attributing lack of travel during the pandemic to this? Why would people being afraid of corona virus disprove that there is a chilling effect? They're unrelated even if they possibly correlate.
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