Lincoln Square - Once a Magnet, Becoming a Pariah
I have family members who live in other countries and are reluctant to visit America now. I have former students who come from abroad and are wondering whether they can stay here. I have friends in Europe who have reached out to check if I’m OK and to say they can’t believe what’s happening in America.
Last month air travel to the U.S. by foreign tourists was down about 10 percent and road trips by Canadians dropped 32 percent year to year. International student enrollment in American colleges and universities, which exceeded 1.1 million a year ago, is expected to drop this year and cause harm to those schools that count on their tuition dollars. Scientists and other post-graduate researchers working in the U.S. are looking to leave our shores as funding cuts and the overall assault on academic research accelerate.
Declining tourism. Declining student enrollment. Accelerating brain drain. These changes represent rational responses and inevitable consequences to the climate of hatred, uncertainty and danger that Trump and his henchmen have fostered, made worse by revoking visas of students and other academics who speak their mind and aggressively stopping foreign visitors at airports or other border crossings.
You may not have heard about the two teenaged German tourists who were detained, handcuffed and put in prison uniforms for allegedly not having proper visas, but I assure you that people in their home country heard about it. And they were not the only European or Canadian tourists who’ve been swept up by increasingly draconian border officials. “We had already noticed a little bit of what was going on in the U.S.,” said one of the German teens about the anti-foreigner reality. “But at the time, we didn't think it was happening to Germans. That was perhaps very naïve. We felt so small and powerless.”
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