Immigration Enforcement Fear Has Driven Away International Tourists for Nine Months. Here’s the Economic Damage—and Who Bears It.

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Sam Nassar works in food service at Universal Studios Hollywood. He knows the park’s rhythms the way a farmer knows weather: which hours should be busy, which lines should be long, which weekends should need extra staff.

Since the start of 2025, those rhythms have been wrong. “We’ve definitely seen a huge dip in attendance,” he told The American Prospect. “My hours have been cut anywhere from 30% to 50%.” He has taken a second job as an in-home caregiver to make ends meet.

Nassar is a US citizen. He has no connection to immigration enforcement policy. He did not design it, cannot vote directly to change it, and has no way to seek compensation from it. He is simply the person standing at the end of a long chain of results that starts with a federal enforcement decision and ends with a smaller paycheck.

That chain is now nine months long and can be measured in dollars. The World Travel and Tourism Council projected in May 2025 that international visitor spending to the US would fall to under $169 billion for the year, down from $181 billion in 2024. That is a $12.5 billion reduction. More than 2.5 million fewer foreign visitors arrived compared to the same periods the prior year.

And the US, according to the WTTC’s analysis of 184 economies, is the only major country in the world forecast to see international visitor spending decline in 2025. The US is losing market share to other major tourism destinations simultaneously.

Nine Consecutive Months: What the Data Shows

Tourism declines happen. A bad hurricane season, a currency swing, a global recession, a pandemic: all of these can cause a sharp drop in visitor arrivals. Those drops typically turn around once the root cause improves. What makes the current decline different is that it has not turned around. It has continued, month after month, for three quarters of a year.

Data from the National Travel and Tourism Office shows that in November 2025, overseas visitor arrivals totaled 2.5 million, down 3.5 percent compared to November 2024. That figure reached 85 percent of pre-pandemic November 2019 levels. International air passenger arrivals declined year-over-year across multiple consecutive months of reporting. Western European visitors fell 5.5 percent in November 2025 compared to the same month a year prior, according to Travel Pulse’s analysis of the NTTO data.

The timing correlates closely with the escalation of immigration enforcement inside the country (not just at the border). Beginning in January 2025, the Trump administration issued executive orders sharply expanding the scope of enforcement operations inside the United States. ICE began conducting large-scale workplace raids in major cities.

Analysis of ICE enforcement data puts the agency’s 2025 interior arrest rate at roughly 746 per day on an annual-average basis, though the pace ranged from around 600 per day early in the year to nearly 1,000 by May before settling near 800 by late June. That average is more than double the daily rate over the preceding decade. Videos and photos of armed federal agents in military-style gear conducting operations in communities across the country spread globally. International travelers read those images as a signal about what kind of country they would be visiting.

The timing is suggestive, but the full decline reflects several competing explanations. The Canadian decline in particular reflects a confluence of factors: Trump’s rhetoric about annexing Canada as a 51st state, sweeping tariffs on Canadian goods that generated sustained bilateral tension, and a broader political climate that made cross-border travel feel freighted with political meaning for many Canadians. The organized Canadian boycott of US goods and travel was clearly driven by trade and sovereignty grievances alongside enforcement concerns.

For European visitors, dollar strength, post-pandemic shifts in travel patterns, and general anti-American sentiment driven by trade disputes may each explain some share of the decline apart from immigration enforcement specifically. No published study has yet separated the immigration enforcement effect from these overlapping factors. The independent contribution of enforcement to the total numbers remains unmeasured.

The WTTC’s projection that the US is the only major economy forecast to see international visitor spending decline fits the enforcement theory. But it also fits the idea that the US is uniquely exposed to the combination of trade conflicts, annexation rhetoric, and enforcement climate at the same time. That is a package of factors that other major tourism destinations did not face. The exact share of the $12.5 billion decline tied specifically to enforcement fear remains disputed and unmeasured. That figure has not been separated from tariff-driven political backlash or other factors.

The Canadian case makes the connection between signals and behavior unusually clear. By US counting methodology, Canada sent roughly 20.4 million visits to the United States in 2024 — Canadian statistics put the figure at 39 million Canadian-resident trips — and those travelers spent roughly $20.5 billion in the US economy.

By late February 2025, an Angus Reid poll found that 56 percent of Canadian respondents had already canceled or were seriously considering delaying plans to travel to the US. An additional 26 percent were still weighing their options at that point.

Flight bookings from Canada to the US collapsed by 71 to 76 percent by March 2025 compared to the same month the previous year. Airlines cut approximately 450,000 seats from Canada-US routes by spring, representing a 10.1 percent capacity reduction for the summer travel season.

Canadian visitors were reacting to several overlapping factors: Trump’s rhetoric about annexing Canada, the administration’s tariffs on Canadian goods, and the broader climate of uncertainty created by aggressive enforcement operations. As one New Hampshire store owner along the Canadian border explained to researchers: “We spoke with Canadian customers who told us point-blank that they were hesitant to cross due to the current political tension. The joy of the ‘shopping day trip’ has been replaced by anxiety over border enforcement and tariffs.” For more on how Canada and the EU have formally responded to this environment, see our earlier coverage of the travel warnings both governments issued.

The geographic concentration of the damage tells its own story. New Hampshire, according to reporting by the Concord Monitor, experienced roughly a 30 percent drop in Canadian visitors, among the largest percentage declines of any state. Mount Washington State Park reported a noticeable decline in Canadian visitation. An estimated 75 to 80 percent fewer Canadians attended Laconia Motorcycle Week compared to prior years. Tourism-dependent communities along the Canadian border from Vermont to Washington State experienced economic shocks during what should have been their peak season.

Sources: Travel Pulse / NTTO analysis; Canadian boycott data; Concord Monitor reporting on New Hampshire. Figures are approximate and reflect varying measurement periods and methodologies.

A Simultaneous Labor and Demand Shock

This tourism disruption differs from most: it is not just a demand problem but also a supply problem.

Immigrants make up an outsized share of the hospitality workforce. In food service in Los Angeles County specifically, immigrants make up roughly 66 percent of all workers, with 79 percent of those being Latino. When enforcement operations increased, some workers left the country on their own; others simply stopped showing up out of fear. One Los Angeles restaurateur described losing his head of kitchen prep, who left voluntarily for Mexico to avoid being deported after his home was raided. He also lost a dishwasher who left after his brother was arrested during a raid at a bus stop. “Everyone is burned out,” the restaurateur said. “There’s not enough rowers in the boat to keep the boat going.”

A hotel cannot cut its cleaning staff in proportion to a 15 percent drop in occupancy. Certain basic functions must continue no matter how many rooms are occupied. A restaurant cannot run without a kitchen. When labor shortages line up with demand decline, businesses face a choice between running at reduced capacity (which means cutting hours for whoever remains) or closing. Many have chosen the former. Some have chosen the latter.

In Los Angeles, where federal enforcement operations were particularly aggressive, the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation surveyed businesses and found that 82 percent of respondents reported being negatively affected by enforcement activity. Among those experiencing revenue losses, 44 percent reported drops exceeding 50 percent. Another 31 percent experienced losses between 26 and 50 percent. More than two-thirds made changes including reducing hours, closing on certain days, and delaying expansion plans.

The most striking single data point from Los Angeles: a week-long curfew imposed from June 10 to 16, 2025, in response to protests tied to immigration enforcement, resulted in an estimated $840 million in total economic losses. That figure includes the equivalent of 3,920 full-time jobs lost for a year. Extended disruption scenarios could potentially generate losses exceeding $2.5 billion. Those were not projections. They were the measured result of a specific policy decision rippling through a specific regional economy over seven days.

$12.5 Billion and Who Pays It

The national total is large enough to feel somewhat abstract.

Tourism contributed $2.6 trillion to the US economy in 2024 and supported more than 20 million jobs. Travel and tourism accounts for nearly 7 percent of all government tax revenue annually, more than $585 billion.

The $12.5 billion drop in international visitor spending means lost federal, state, and local tax collections. Those collections would otherwise have funded schools, infrastructure, and public services. WTTC President and CEO Julia Simpson put it plainly: “The world’s biggest Travel and Tourism economy is heading in the wrong direction, not because of a lack of demand, but because of a failure to act.”

California provides a concrete fiscal example. The state generates approximately $157 billion annually from tourism spending, supporting 1.2 million jobs. California had recorded a 10 percent increase in international visitors for full-year 2024. The reversal to a 7.2 percent decline in December 2025 compared to December 2024 is a swing of roughly 17 percentage points. Note that the two figures cover different time periods: a full calendar year versus a single month. The lost state and local tax revenue from that kind of drop runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The leisure and hospitality sector added an average of only 12,000 jobs per month in 2025, roughly flat compared to 2024, at a time when the sector should have been recovering and expanding. Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows 98,000 fewer people employed in leisure and hospitality in December 2025 compared to December 2024. Unemployment in the sector rose to 6.1 percent from 5.5 percent the prior year.

United Parks & Resorts, the parent company of SeaWorld and Busch Gardens, reported that its properties hosted 21.2 million guests in 2025, down 1.8 percent from 2024. Total revenue dropped 3.6 percent to $1.7 billion. The company explicitly cited lower international attendance as a driving factor. Disney has reported similar trends. These are large companies with enough financial reserves to absorb a bad year. The independent hotel operator in a small border town does not have that buffer.

But the raw employment figures miss a common response to demand drops in hospitality: hour reductions. When a restaurant’s customer traffic falls 25 percent, it may lay off staff or schedule them for fewer shifts. A server working 35 hours per week gets 25 hours instead. A kitchen prep worker’s shift is cut by two hours.

These are not layoffs that trigger unemployment insurance eligibility. The workers remain technically employed. They are simply earning much less, with no policy tool available to compensate them for the difference.

The Workers Who Have No Recourse

Hospitality work is held more than average by workers without college degrees, by workers who are people of color, and by women. A 30 percent reduction in hours for a food service worker earning $16 per hour comes to roughly $200 per week in lost income. Over a year, that is approximately $10,000. For a household living on the edge, that is not an inconvenience. It is a crisis that shows up in missed rent payments, reduced grocery budgets, and delayed medical care.

The safety net has gaps for exactly these situations. A worker whose hours are reduced from full-time to part-time but who is still employed typically does not qualify for unemployment insurance. Eligibility rules vary by state; some states offer partial benefits for significantly reduced hours, but others require full unemployment with no fault of the worker’s own. A worker earning reduced wages may eventually qualify for SNAP or other income-based benefits. But income limits for qualifying and application delays often mean weeks or months of reduced income before any support arrives.

There is no federal relief program for tourism-dependent businesses experiencing a drop in customers caused by government policy. No emergency fund. No worker income support for hospitality employees with reduced hours. No compensation mechanism for communities experiencing tourism-driven tax revenue losses. The economic cost falls entirely on private-sector workers and businesses and state and local governments.

Critics including UNITE HERE argue that this reflects a double standard: immigration enforcement is being treated as a national priority important enough to impose economic costs on workers and communities, costs they argue would not be accepted without compensatory mechanisms if they came from a trade policy decision or a regulatory change.

That comparison has limits: trade adjustment assistance programs have historically been underfunded and hard to access, and there is no general federal mechanism that reliably compensates workers for demand drops arising from any policy area. But UNITE HERE and allied labor advocates argue that the lack of even a discussion of relief for affected hospitality workers reflects a choice about who pays the price in the policy process and whose costs are not. The majority of those workers, like Sam Nassar, are US citizens or legal residents with no connection to the enforcement actions driving the decline.

UNITE HERE, the hospitality workers union, has become the primary organized voice raising this concern. “While immigrant families are on the front lines of the White House’s violent crackdowns and enforcement actions, our members, immigrant and US-born alike, are struggling with their economic impact,” said Gwen Mills, the union’s president, in February 2026. The union’s report titled “Inhospitable” documented the scope of the damage through worker testimony. Rhodora Barry, a master cook at the Flamingo in Las Vegas and a union member for 25 years, described it this way: “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 10 percent decrease makes a difference when you are living paycheck to paycheck.”

Sam Nassar is a US citizen with no connection to immigration enforcement policy and no mechanism for contesting a policy whose economic costs he is required to absorb personally. The administration’s economic case includes claims about the fiscal costs of undocumented immigration, wage suppression effects on low-income native workers, and public safety benefits. Those benefits do not appear in tourism revenue tallies.

The administration’s labor-substitution argument holds that departing foreign-born workers create openings for native-born workers — though National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett’s own documented views favor immigration as an economic growth driver, and his specific endorsement of that framing has not been confirmed.

What they do not address, and what the tourism data specifically complicates, is the demand side: the customers who are also departing, and whose spending supported the jobs the policy is theoretically creating space for native-born workers to fill.

For a broader look at the economic ripple effects of workers losing jobs or leaving because of enforcement, our earlier analysis of the economic case for immigration covers the labor market data in detail. That includes the Economic Policy Institute’s estimate that deporting one million immigrants per year would result in 2.6 million fewer employed US-born workers over four years.

The Enforcement Math That Doesn’t Add Up

First, administration officials have clearly framed high-visibility enforcement as intentional deterrence, not merely a side effect of operational pace. The theory is that dramatic, publicized operations change behavior at the border and among the undocumented population in ways that removal numbers alone do not show. On this view, the images of armed agents conducting workplace raids are not a communications failure. They are the policy. DHS and White House statements have consistently described the goal as creating conditions under which voluntary departure and reduced illegal entry become logical choices for a large population, multiplying the effect of any given arrest many times over. If deterrence is working as intended, the administration would argue, the key measure is not deportation volume but the change in the number of undocumented residents and the rate of new illegal entries. The administration contends both are moving in the right direction.

Second, administration supporters argue that the current economic disruption is the expected and acceptable cost of fixing a decade or more of deliberate under-enforcement. On this argument, prior administrations created the conditions, a large undocumented workforce deeply rooted in labor-intensive industries, that make any serious enforcement effort look economically disruptive.

The disruption, in other words, is not proof that the policy is wrong. It is proof of how far the system drifted from the law as written. Short-term pain in hospitality employment is, on this view, the price of restoring a legal labor market that benefits native-born workers over the long run.

Third, analysts aligned with the administration have pointed to fiscal costs of undocumented immigration — public services, education, healthcare — and public safety benefits that do not appear in tourism revenue tallies.

The deterrence theory assumes that the reputational signal sent by interior enforcement operations is picked up mainly by potential illegal entrants and the undocumented population. The data suggests it is also being picked up, loudly, by legal international visitors who have no connection to immigration status.

Canadian tourists, European business travelers, and World Cup ticket-buyers are canceling trips. They are doing so not because they fear deportation but because the overall signal about the United States as a destination has changed. The deterrence benefit, if real, is being paid for in part by a group the policy was not targeting.

The prior-non-enforcement argument is harder to assess in the short run, but it does not resolve the fairness question: the workers absorbing the transition costs, reduced hours, lost tips, closed restaurants, are not the workers who set the prior enforcement policy, and there is no mechanism compensating them for the correction.

Consider the removal numbers directly. Analysis of immigration enforcement data indicates that deportations following ICE interior arrests increased substantially between the second half of 2024 and the final months of 2025. Yet Brookings estimates total 2025 removals at roughly 310,000 — a figure that varies across data sources and should be treated as an approximation — remaining well below the administration’s stated annual target of one million deportations.

The visible enforcement activity, the kind that produces globally shared images of armed agents in military gear, is limited by detention capacity, legal procedures, and cooperation from foreign governments in accepting their citizens back when the US deports them. The images spread faster than the actual removal numbers.

This creates a specific kind of policy tension. The enforcement operations are producing substantial international reputational costs while, by the administration’s own removal targets, producing enforcement results that fall short of the stated goals. Those goals are needed to achieve the deterrence and labor-market effects the policy is designed to produce. Whether the deterrence benefits justify those costs is a policy question that should be openly debated rather than treated as a hidden cost that gets dumped on hospitality workers who had no vote in the matter. Our earlier piece on the pros and cons of mass deportation covers the broader policy tradeoffs in detail.

The 2026 World Cup: The Clearest Near-Term Test of Reputational Recovery

The 2026 FIFA World Cup, scheduled for June and July 2026 and co-hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico, is the clearest near-term test of whether the reputational damage is reversible. The tournament is expected to attract 6 to 7 million ticket-buyers, with roughly half expected to be international visitors. The expected economic boost is estimated at $30 billion. That figure assumes international visitors come.

The co-hosting arrangement creates a built-in tension that has no obvious resolution. Canada and Mexico are both hosting matches and are both countries whose citizens have been actively avoiding the United States for the past nine months. A Brazilian fan who buys tickets to matches in both New York and Toronto will have to decide whether crossing into the US feels safe. A German fan attending matches in Los Angeles will have taken in months of news coverage about immigration enforcement operations in that city.

Tourism Economics and industry analysts have noted that the tournament represents the biggest near-term opportunity to reverse reputational damage. Its effect will depend on whether enforcement conditions and the broader political climate change meaningfully before June 2026 — if they do not, the event may deepen rather than ease existing traveler hesitancy.

Julia Simpson, President & CEO of the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), noted in May 2025 that “it could take several years for the US to return to pre-pandemic levels of international visitor spend, not even the peak from 10 years ago” without significant action to restore international traveler confidence. That assessment was made before the full nine months of decline had accumulated. The World Cup is the most visible opportunity to test whether that timeline can be shortened. It is also, if the current environment persists, the most visible opportunity to confirm that it cannot.

Destination choice tends to be self-reinforcing: past choices shape future ones, in ways that matter for long-run economics. A traveler who visits Canada instead of the US this year forms memories and impressions of Canada. They recommend it. They return. The Canadian tourism infrastructure improves to meet demand. Meanwhile, the US loses not just this year’s spending but the future visits that would have followed from a positive experience. Nine months of decline is a data point. Two or three years of decline is a permanent change in how the world travels, not just a temporary dip. That kind of shift takes a decade to undo, if it undoes at all.

For Sam Nassar, none of that long-run analysis changes the immediate reality of a smaller paycheck and a second job. The international perception of the United States as a destination will continue to be shaped by images and news that spread far beyond the control of any tourism promotion campaign. And the workers who happen to be standing at the end of that chain will continue absorbing costs that no one in the policy process has been asked to justify, measure, or compensate.

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