Why a Targeted Travel Ban Mostly Reduced Visitors from Non-Targeted Countries

• In Event: Politics and Population Processes

Abstract

Many scholars of migration have assessed the domestic audience costs of controversial migra-tion policies; however, less examined are the unintended interpretations and consequences of such policy changes for domestic constituents due to how such policies impact the opinion of foreign audiences and their intentions to travel to the country. Based on a quantitative analysis of over 220 million observations of foreigners entering the US that after the 2016 election, the 2017 travel ban, and the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the ban, I find that after each event, fewer foreign nationals entered the US from continents not targeted by the ban than from coun-tries targeted by the ban. I also offer textual evidence from social media posts by potential trav-elers to the US that they decided to cancel plans to visit the US because they found Trump’s re-strictive campaign promise and later policy to ban specific foreign nationalities morally offensive, or because they felt a sense of linked fate with the targeted nationalities and therefore vulnerable. This study contributes to research on how migration policies of governments can have unin-tended consequences and chilling effects for international migrant and traveler flows, largely due to how foreign nationals interpret such controversial policies.

Authors

• Jacob Richard Thomas, Corvinus University of Budapest

• Linze Wu, Independent Scholar