Fool me twice
This graph (from Semafor) has circulated a lot on social media
It shows an incredible drop in tourist visits to the US this year. Literally incredible (literally literally).
Kieran Healy explains what the problem is (we have only partial data for 2026) and gives a better graph, showing that tourism from Canada is genuinely down to some extent, but there isn’t a huge difference for other major countries (though NZ, which he doesn’t look at, is also down).
What’s embarrassing for the data-oriented social media community is that it’s the second time. Last March, a substantial fall in US visitor numbers “year on year” was seen, and interpreted as a backlash to President Trump. In fact, the “fall” was just that the Easter tourism peak had moved from March in 2024 to April in 2025. We can blame the Council of Nicaea, not the US President.
Interestingly, if you look at the text in the linked Semaphor piece, it says visits are “on track to drop by almost two million year-on-year”, which seems to fit Kieran’s corrected graph rather than the original one.

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