Canada and the EU Have Issued Travel Warnings About the US. Here’s What International Travel Agreements Require the US to Do in Response.

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When Germany’s foreign ministry warns its transgender citizens to contact the US Embassy before booking a flight, something has shifted. In early 2026, it issued a formal advisory stating that “the relevant gender identity of the applicant at the time of birth is the relevant one.” It also noted that anyone with an “X” gender designation in their passport should seek guidance before traveling.

Finland followed with similar language regarding travelers whose passport gender does not match the gender assigned at birth, warning that US authorities may deny travel permits or visas. Denmark, the Netherlands, Ireland, France, and the United Kingdom all issued similar warnings. Canada, meanwhile, updated its advisory to inform travelers that US law requires foreign nationals staying longer than thirty days to register with US authorities. It warned that failure to comply could result in “penalties, fines, and misdemeanor prosecution.”

These are formal government advisories, though their severity varies considerably and requires careful description. Canada’s updated advisory, for example, carries the descriptor “Take normal security precautions” — the lowest tier on its four-level scale.

Germany’s and Finland’s warnings are aimed at specific groups, transgender and nonbinary travelers, rather than general warnings applied to all visitors. The UK’s updated language focuses on strict enforcement of entry rules rather than signaling systemic danger. These advisories are notable precisely because they come from close allies who rarely update US travel guidance at all. Their significance lies in that break from the norm, not in being equal to warnings issued for conflict zones or authoritarian states.

What they share is a common finding, reached independently by multiple governments: specific groups of their citizens face documented, higher risks at American ports of entry. Travelers should know about these risks before booking flights.

Some countries have signed reciprocal travel agreements with the United States. When such a country formally warns its citizens that American border officials may detain, deny entry, or otherwise mistreat them, what do those agreements require the US to do?

The Incidents Behind the Allied Warnings

The incidents behind these advisories are documented. A Welsh traveler housesitting on a tourist visa was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for nineteen days with no clear legal basis. Three German citizens, including green card holder Fabian Schmidt, were detained at US entry points — Schmidt for nearly two months, Jessica Brösche for more than six weeks, and Lucas Sielaff for two weeks — with US authorities citing reasons that Germany disputed. The Assembly of First Nations confirmed that at least one First Nations person had a negative encounter with ICE and returned to Canada.

Canada’s advisory now notes that acceptance of First Nations status cards at the border is “entirely at the discretion of U.S. Officials.” This means Indigenous Canadians must carry passports in addition to their status cards. This is a reversal of a long-standing framework.

The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office updated its guidance around the time of the Welsh traveler’s detention — though the FCDO did not confirm the update was directly prompted by that case when asked. It warned that “U.S. authorities impose and uphold entry regulations stringently. You may face arrest or detention if you violate these rules.” Germany documented its citizens’ detentions and warned that “a criminal conviction in the United States, false information regarding the purpose of stay, or even a slight overstay of the visa upon entry or exit can lead to arrest, detention, and deportation upon entry or exit.”

Multiple allied governments concluded, independently, that they had a duty to warn their citizens about systematic risks at American ports of entry. The question is whether those warnings trigger any corresponding obligation on the American side.

The Visa Waiver Program: Reciprocity Without Enforcement

The most directly implicated agreement is the Visa Waiver Program. Started in 1986 and now covering 42 designated nations, the VWP allows citizens of allied states to travel to the US for up to ninety days without a visa. Travelers must obtain authorization through the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA). The program was explicitly designed as a reciprocal arrangement. To participate, a nation must extend visa-free entry to US citizens in return.

This reciprocity principle is not just symbolic language. It is the core foundation of the agreement. The legal framework also requires that program countries keep visitor visa refusal rates below three percent, issue biometric passports meeting international standards, and not undermine US law enforcement interests. The law allows for countries to be removed from the program if their citizens break admission terms at high rates.

Here is the gap that matters: the law says nothing about what happens when a VWP partner argues that the United States itself is breaking the reciprocity expectation. Specifically, it says nothing about claims that the US is routinely mistreating a partner’s citizens at American ports of entry.

The framework contains a tool for one direction of accountability only. The US can suspend a member from the program. There is no matching tool for what happens when a nation’s citizens argue the US has broken the mutual treatment expectation.

According to the Congressional Research Service, no nation has been removed from the VWP since 2003. This is despite the program expanding to 42 participating members. There is no modern example of a VWP partner formally threatening the US with suspension or downgrade.

No public records exist of what diplomatic process would even be started if one did. The statute is silent on this, the regulations do not clarify it, and the State Department has not addressed it publicly.

What the VWP creates, in practice, is a one-way ratchet: the US holds the power to remove countries from the program, but partner countries have no matching tool written into the agreement itself.

CUSMA: The One Agreement With Actual Teeth

Canada’s situation is different, because Canada has a different agreement. The Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA, known as USMCA on the American side) includes Chapter 15, which governs cross-border trade in services. It also contemplates temporary entry of business persons and professionals between the two countries. The agreement’s Chapter 15 framework reflects a core principle: temporary movement across borders for legitimate purposes should not face unreasonable restrictions.

More importantly, CUSMA contains a real dispute settlement process. Chapter 31 allows either party to bring a dispute to an arbitral panel if the other party is found to have broken the agreement’s obligations. The text emphasizes mutually agreed solutions, and whether a panel could unilaterally authorize suspension of equivalent benefits — including tariffs — is not clearly established. CUSMA is nonetheless foundational to the integrated North American economy, and the mechanism’s existence carries weight.

The genuinely disputed legal question is whether a systematic pattern of detention and denial of entry, the kind described in Canada’s travel advisory, could count as a violation of Chapter 15’s temporary entry provisions. A Canadian consultant put off from traveling to the US due to fear of detention is, in a practical sense, unable to access the cross-border services market that CUSMA envisions. Whether an arbitral panel would accept that argument has never been tested. Whether immigration enforcement is excluded from trade agreement obligations has also never been tested. No CUSMA dispute has ever addressed this issue.

What is clear is that the mechanism exists. Canada’s decision not to use it, at least as of early 2026, is itself a diplomatic choice, not a legal inevitability. Prime Minister Mark Carney has spoken publicly about US-Canada relations but has not explicitly threatened a CUSMA dispute related to the travel advisory.

Whether that restraint reflects a legal view about the case’s merits is not publicly known. It may also reflect a political calculation about escalation, or simply a preference for bilateral diplomacy over formal arbitration.

For a broader look at the legal framework governing who the US can restrict from entry, our earlier analysis of the pros and cons of Trump’s travel bans covers the statutory and constitutional field in detail.

The WTO Route: Theoretically Available, Practically Useless

The World Trade Organization’s General Agreement on Trade in Services has been signed by the US and all EU member states. It covers what trade lawyers call “Mode 2” services supply: consumption abroad. When a foreign national travels to the US to spend money on hotels, restaurants, and attractions, that counts as Mode 2 trade. The US has made specific commitments under GATS about which service sectors are covered and how much market access it will provide.

GATS includes a national treatment obligation: foreign service consumers must be treated no worse than domestic ones. If US immigration enforcement routinely discourages foreign nationals from entering the country to use tourism services, there is at least a theoretical argument that this breaks the national treatment commitment. The GATS framework contemplates exactly this kind of services trade.

But here is the practical reality. Immigration enforcement is generally seen as falling outside the scope of services trade agreements because it is considered a core exercise of state sovereignty. The US would almost certainly invoke the WTO’s security exception, arguing that immigration enforcement falls within measures needed to protect national security or public order. Whether a dispute panel would agree is uncertain, but the historical record suggests panels give countries significant leeway on immigration decisions.

A successful GATS challenge to immigration enforcement would be extremely difficult to bring and would take years to resolve. The remedy, even if the complaining country won, would be permission to retaliate by restricting US services imports by an equivalent value. This is a blunt tool that countries rarely use.

EU member states have fewer formal tools than Canada: historically there was no EU-US agreement equivalent to CUSMA with a binding dispute resolution mechanism, and while a new EU-US trade framework was announced in mid-2025, it remains without a fully implemented dispute mechanism as negotiations continue. The EU’s influence is more spread out: bilateral relationships, tariff negotiations, investment policy, and the combined weight of representing the world’s second-largest economy. Individual EU member states could strengthen their travel advisories further. They could add more specific language about detention risks, or warn that having a US visa does not guarantee entry. Several have already done all of this.

None of these steps would directly compel a change in US policy.

The Numbers Behind the Warnings

Against this backdrop of unclear legal obligations sits a set of economic facts that are not in dispute. The US experienced nine consecutive months of year-over-year declines in international visitor arrivals through 2025. The World Travel and Tourism Council estimated a $12.5 billion projected downturn in international visitor spending. According to the WTTC, the US became the only country among 184 economies studied globally to see international visitor spending fall during this period.

The Canadian decline is particularly striking. Statistics Canada reported a twenty-three percent drop in Canadians driving to the US in February 2025 compared to February 2024. Tourism Economics projects a fifteen percent reduction in Canadian visits for 2026. This could result in losses of up to sixty-four billion dollars in Canadian spending in the United States.

The table below captures the scale of the documented decline across key metrics:

Sources: World Travel and Tourism Council; UNITE HERE Inhospitable Report, February 2026; Business Insider reporting on travel advisories. Projected figures represent estimates and may vary.

The regional effects are not evenly spread. Washington, DC, saw a six-and-a-half percent decline in international tourism in 2025 following aggressive immigration enforcement in the capital. Restaurant bookings in DC dropped by roughly thirty percent immediately after the federal presence announcement. Miami’s labor participation rate fell to fifty-seven-and-a-half percent in November 2025. That was the lowest since February 2021. The cancellation of Temporary Protected Status removed work authorization for many hospitality employees.

Nassar, a thirty-nine-year-old worker at Universal Studios Orlando who works primarily in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter area, described the change directly. Since the start of last year, attendance had dropped noticeably, and his hours had been cut anywhere from thirty to fifty percent. “I’m not sure if they’re afraid to come or if it’s a financial situation, but we’ve definitely felt it.”

UNITE HERE is a labor union that has publicly opposed the administration’s immigration enforcement policies and has a direct interest in the outcomes it is measuring. It documented that overall travel receipts were down more than one billion dollars in September 2025 compared to the year before. It also found that ninety-eight thousand fewer people were employed in leisure and hospitality in December 2025 than at the same time in 2024. UNITE HERE’s methods attribute these declines primarily to immigration enforcement. The union’s figures represent one approach to the analysis. They have not been independently confirmed by federal statistical agencies.

It is also worth noting that the visitor decline figures cited in this article reflect multiple factors that overlap. These include the relative strength of the US dollar against the Canadian dollar and euro, which makes US travel more costly for foreign visitors. They also include ongoing post-pandemic settling of travel patterns globally. The administration has not publicly offered an alternative economic analysis challenging the WTTC or Tourism Economics projections. Independent economists would note that singling out enforcement as the primary cause, rather than one factor among several, requires analytical assumptions that are not fully clear in the available public data.

The Supply Side Is Under Pressure Too

What makes this situation different from an ordinary tourism downturn is that the hospitality industry is being squeezed from both directions at the same time. There are fewer international visitors creating demand. There are also fewer available workers to serve those visitors.

The US hospitality and tourism industry directly employs almost fifteen million Americans in a subset of the broader sector — the restaurant industry alone exceeds that figure — and its ranking among US industries by size varies depending on how the sector is defined. Foreign-born workers make up more than one in five workers in the sector, with much higher shares in more labor-intensive roles. In Nevada, immigrants often hold the jobs that allow hotels and casinos to run at scale. Their presence creates demand for jobs held by American workers at every skill level.

The Economic Policy Institute projects that if the administration deports one million immigrants annually, the cumulative effect over four years would eliminate 3.3 million jobs held by immigrants. This figure accounts for factors such as partial labor market absorption and replacement, meaning not every deportation leads directly to a permanent job loss. Because immigrant and US-born workers’ jobs are often economically linked, approximately 2.6 million jobs held by US-born workers would also be lost as ripple effects spread through the economy. Total job losses would reach roughly 5.9 million. For a fuller picture of the deportation program’s scope and mechanics, our coverage of the pros and cons of Trump’s mass deportation promise lays out the numbers and the arguments on both sides.

Greg Varney, a line cook at St. Anselm in Washington, DC, described what the enforcement environment feels like from inside a kitchen: “This has made my own job doubly hard and stressful. Especially during the occupation, there was an intense and palpable fear in the kitchen. People had family members who were taken. We all now jerk our heads up whenever we hear sirens, even in a city like DC where it’s common. I’ve had to come in when I wasn’t scheduled because of the increase of call-outs among staff.”

Rhodora Barry, a master cook at the Flamingo in Las Vegas and a Culinary Union member for twenty-five years, put it in economic terms: “You can feel that business has slowed down. People are spending less, and some of my coworkers who depend on tips are seeing a real drop. Even a ten percent decrease makes a difference when you are living paycheck to paycheck.”

This is not a sector experiencing a cyclical dip — it is experiencing structural pressure from two directions simultaneously.

The US Government’s Non-Response

As of early 2026, the Trump administration has given no formal response to Canada’s or the EU member states’ travel advisories. The State Department has released no public statements addressing them. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has not publicly addressed the warnings in the context of international treaty obligations or reciprocal commitments.

The National Travel and Tourism Office, a division of the International Trade Administration under the Commerce Department, published forecasts projecting that international visitor arrivals would reach eighty-five million in 2026, exceeding pre-pandemic 2019 levels. A separate May 2025 forecast on international visitor spending decline was issued by the WTTC. Both sets of projections preceded the full scale of the nine-month consecutive decline visible in later data.

Before judging what that silence means, the administration’s strongest case deserves a fair hearing, because it is more solid than the absence of public statements suggests.

Start with the legal foundation. The administration’s authority to make the detention and entry decisions behind these advisories rests on the plenary power doctrine, one of the most lasting principles in American constitutional law. A line of Supreme Court precedent stretches from Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889) through Kleindienst v. Mandel (1972) and is confirmed in more recent visa denial cases.

Under this precedent, Congress and the executive branch hold nearly unreviewable authority over the admission and exclusion of foreign nationals. Courts have consistently refused to second-guess immigration enforcement decisions on substantive grounds.

The administration can correctly argue that this is not a preference but a constitutionally and legally grounded framework with extensive judicial support. From this perspective, allied governments issuing travel advisories in response to lawful exercises of plenary power are, in effect, trying to limit US sovereign authority. That diplomatic pressure has no legal weight.

On the specific incidents cited in the advisories, the administration’s position, to the extent it has been stated through CBP and DHS statements, is that many detentions involved genuine legal gray areas. These include visa overstays, status discrepancies, or documentation issues that the advisories describe uncharitably. A traveler described in a foreign advisory as held “with no apparent violations” may, in the administration’s account, have had an unresolved status question that CBP was legally required to investigate.

The administration would also note that some allied governments issuing advisories have their own political reasons. Domestic audiences skeptical of US policy, trade disputes running at the same time, or coalition politics can make their advisories something other than purely neutral risk assessments.

On the economic side, the administration has not publicly challenged the WTTC figures. Its implied calculation appears to be that enforcement-driven deterrence effects, reducing unlawful entries, visa overstays, and unauthorized work, produce benefits that offset the tourism revenue losses critics emphasize. Whether that trade-off is sound policy is a fair debate. It is not an irrational one.

With that case laid out, the evidence in this article still points toward significant costs the administration has not publicly accounted for. The plenary power doctrine establishes legal authority. It does not mean that every use of that authority is cost-free or strategically sound. The specific incidents cited in allied advisories, including a green card holder detained for weeks and First Nations travelers affected by discretionary enforcement, involve groups of travelers whose legal status is not obviously unclear. This weakens the “routine enforcement” framing.

The economic signal is also hard to dismiss: nine consecutive months of visitor declines, a twenty-three percent drop in Canadian cross-border travel, and a hospitality workforce shrinking from both ends. These trends are not easily explained by deterrence benefits that have not been publicly measured. The administration may have a clear position. It has not made the case for it.

The private sector has not been similarly quiet. The World Travel & Tourism Council has called for immediate action to “restore international traveller confidence.” Its President & CEO Julia Simpson warned that “without urgent action to restore international traveller confidence, it could take several years for the U.S. just to return to pre-pandemic levels of international visitor spend, not even the peak from 10 years ago.” The US Travel Association has made related calls for action using different language. The American Hotel and Lodging Association has documented economic impacts across the industry. But these are industry voices, not official US government positions addressing what allied nations have formally communicated.

For context on how the federal government normally promotes inbound tourism, including the Commerce Department’s role and the Brand USA program, see our earlier piece on how government promotes US tourism. The contrast between that promotional infrastructure and the current silence is worth noting.

What Options Exist, and Why None Are Simple

If the administration were to take the travel warnings seriously, several options exist that stop short of changing immigration enforcement itself.

On the diplomatic end, the State Department could begin formal consultations with Canada and EU member states to understand the specific incidents that prompted the advisories. Those conversations might make clear whether the advisories reflect systematic patterns or isolated incidents. No policy changes would be required, only dialogue. The fact that this has not happened is a choice.

More concretely, the administration could issue clearer guidance to Customs and Border Protection officers about detention procedures and the burden of proof required to hold travelers. The incidents cited in EU advisories involved travelers held for weeks with no apparent legal violation. If detention authority is being used beyond what the law permits, clearer internal guidance could limit it without changing enforcement policy.

The administration could also address the specific groups of travelers flagged in EU advisories, particularly the gender identity issues raised by Germany, Finland, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Some observers have suggested that the executive order declaring that the US recognizes only binary gender categories could be narrowly applied to document processing while keeping existing procedures for visa applicants whose passport gender designation differs from their birth sex. But this framing misrepresents the administration’s stated position. Administration officials have been clear that the executive order reflects a firm policy decision about gender recognition. Specifically, the federal government will recognize only biological sex as defined at birth. This is not an administrative detail about how documents are processed. From the administration’s perspective, “narrowly tailoring” the order to fit European passport conventions would directly contradict its stated purpose and would represent a policy reversal, not a procedural adjustment. This is a real tension, not an obvious fix. The concerns raised in multiple European advisories come directly from a policy the administration has described as intentional and foundational. Resolving the advisory language and keeping the policy as written may not both be possible at the same time.

None of these options involve giving up immigration enforcement. Each involves changing how enforcement is carried out, how discretion is used, or how the system treats specific groups of travelers. Whether the administration views any of these as worth the trade-off is a political call, not a legal one. And the administration has, so far, answered that question with silence.

The Test That Is Coming

There is a specific upcoming event that will put all of this to the test in a public way. The 2026 FIFA World Cup is scheduled to be hosted jointly by the United States, Canada, and Mexico, with matches in eleven American cities — Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, New York/New Jersey, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seattle — out of sixteen host cities across all three nations. Canada has already published specific guidance for fans traveling to the US for the tournament. The Canadian government has been careful to note that its travel advisory remains in effect for the duration.

The World Cup will bring hundreds of thousands of international visitors to the US from countries that have issued travel warnings. It will focus that travel into specific cities over a short period. It will involve fans from nations whose governments have formally warned them about detention risks, gender identity documentation issues, and aggressive secondary inspection. It will happen under the full glare of international media coverage.

The World Cup will produce concrete, observable data on several questions this article has raised. On the demand side: do international visitor arrivals from advisory-issuing countries, Canada, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, recover during the tournament? This would suggest that enforcement concerns are outweighed by event-specific demand. Or do they stay low compared to similar international tournaments? On the enforcement side: do CBP secondary inspection rates for citizens of advisory-issuing countries change during the tournament period? If so, does the administration describe any change as a routine operational adjustment for a major event, or does it acknowledge a connection to the advisory concerns? On the diplomatic side: do any allied governments strengthen their advisory language in response to incidents during the tournament, or does the event pass without the specific detention and documentation incidents that prompted the current warnings?

What the World Cup will not do, on its own, is settle the underlying legal and policy questions this article has examined. The VWP’s one-directional accountability structure, the untested CUSMA dispute mechanism, and the administration’s unreviewable plenary power authority will all remain in place.

The international legal system has unclear obligations and weak enforcement mechanisms for situations like this one. The VWP has no reciprocal accountability mechanism. CUSMA has one, but Canada has not used it. GATS is theoretically available but practically unworkable for immigration challenges. What the economic system has, by contrast, is a clear signal: nine months of consecutive visitor declines, a twenty-three percent drop in Canadian cross-border travel, and a hospitality workforce being pressed from both ends. Whether that signal is enough to produce a policy response is the question that remains open. The World Cup may be the moment when the answer becomes unavoidable.

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