(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Early in President Donald Trump’s first term, there was much talk about whether his xenophobic utterances and immigration restrictions would decimate tourism to the US. In the end, they really didn’t.
The number of international visitors to the US fell slightly in the first few months after Trump took office in January 2017, but reports of significant declines for the rest of the year turned out to be the product of a programming error at airport kiosks. Once that was cleared up, the numbers showed international arrivals rising modestly in 2017 after falling the year before. By February 2020, just before the Covid-19 pandemic began shutting everything down in the US, the number of international visitors over the previous 12 months was up by 2.8 million, or 3.7%, fro