Most of the world is not visiting the US right now which means projects and planning that was made in anticipation for summer has probably been halted or heavily reduced.
Now instead they pay for the plane tickets to bring my nephew up to Canada.
December 2025, statscan calculated that cross-border auto traffic was down 30% (mostly same-day trips).
Air travel is only down 11%, and air travel to other countries is up 13%.
https://globalnews.ca/news/11679293/us-canada-travel-rates-d...
They didn't break down how much of that was tourism vs work.
(Asking for a friend.)
I live in Switzerland, and literally everybody I talk to in our circles - bankers, doctors etc. despises US right now. The idea of going there as a tourist is immediately laughed at or met with puzzled look. Professional reasons or conferences are not even brought up, its automatic no and employers usually don't even try suggesting those.
We ourselves with kids wanted to do the trip either this or next summer, but hell will freeze sooner. Some meager +-10k from us, I know just a drop in the ocean but there could have been many such drops. Other, less hostile economies deserve these way more.
That said, I do think some people are doing things for the wrong reasons and there is some manipulation of the masses at play here. One example is I expect most people don't really understand the tariff situation between Canada and the US and that most goods are still exempt from taxes and the agreements hold. I think some people want to punish the US for tariffs that don't exist.
As a Canadian we should push back strongly against attacks on our sovereignty. We should also be somewhat concerned about the direction our neighbor is going in general. But it's also a reality that the US is very very close to us both geographically, culturally, and economically. That's not going to change. It's not an "enemy country" despite their very questionable choice of leaders. I think the correct long term direction is open borders and open trade, somewhat like the EU, and we shouldn't lose sight of that because a bad leader is in place today.
It's very weird to me to see all the focus on US policies in the Canadian discourse while not enough focus on Canada. That feels like political distraction.
But to judge?
Okay
edit: The truth hurts apparently.
Meanwhile it's perfectly acceptable, if not a point of pride, for Canadians to go to Cuba, which is not only run by an actual, kleptocratic dictatorship that imprisons dissidents for decades at a time, but is also the number #1 destination in the Americas for sex tourists, including child sex tourists, with the industry even tacitly sanctioned by the dictatorship ("jineterismo").
Just a observation from my personal life, my friends who aren't broke, are still going to Florida, etc.
I recently went back for a funeral, and I had to spend a moment reminding myself that it would be fine for me.
For people who don't have my passport, I wouldn't feel comfortable telling them "it will be fine", though I would still tell a European "the odds of a problem are relatively low." But I couldn't in all honesty say "there's nothing to worry about."
Your passport does not matter, the colour of your skin does:
"US citizens jailed in LA Ice raids speak out: ‘They came ready to attack’":
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/05/us-citizens-...
"A U.S. citizen says ICE forced open the door to his Minnesota home and removed him in his underwear after a warrantless search"
* https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-u-s-citizen-says-ice-f...
But seeing my engineer freak out about flying in a plane, despite passing Diff Eq and knowing the probability of a crash... Feelings/emotions do matter.
This is why populist demagogues win elections... ugh...
I WISH governments would be for the people and not for the powerful who can buy "justice" .. for themselves.
Unfortunely my home country has too many fanboys of older times, aka Chega, so I hope you still manage a good time there.
These recent job losses are probably not attributable to tourism since that’s unchanged year over year.
I’m not saying tourism is not a factor or denying anecdotes about people not visiting the US, but I don’t think it’s the explanation for the February 2026 job losses.
One thing worth noting is that the tax structure of American cities can be more based on sales taxes than property taxes, and so if tourism is down, and sales is down, this will begin to impact city budgets, which can have rippling effects elsewhere. For example municipal cutbacks to landscaping budgets could impact private contractors etc.
This is accurate. This thread is people emoting. I get it, might as well let it out. Tourism being major part of the US GDP feels like countries whose GDP depends on tourism, projecting. I get that too, if that is the paradigm you live in every day, that is the lens you view things through.
Tourism is probably affecting local economies at the margins, and there is a real loss there for those communities. The US GDP as a whole? Not even a rounding error.
I live in a border state with Canada and this is having a huge impact for my community and those around us. I can't imaging it not impacting at least 40,000 Americans.
I wonder how many Americans of means are vacationing abroad instead of domestically just to get some respite...
I would love to emigrate to Europe. One of the nights in Amsterdam, I couldn't sleep and spent the night frantically researching how to legally emigrate.
As a US citizen who has daydreamed about moving to a Dutch city like Ultrecht I'm curious what they found, and how it feels to be an immigrant in the Netherlands.
It does all seem to be too much.
Reminded me of COVID time...
Sure, there will always be die-hard fans that will show up not matter what, but with so many teams, I bet we'll see empty stadiums for some matches.
You mean full of AI spectators.
2. International Tourism in the US is not that big. Total international visits were expected to fall from 72.4 million (2024) to about 67.9 million (2025). https://www.ustravel.org/press/us-travel-forecast-2025-modes... So visitors to the U.S. dropped about 6% in 2025. I've seen some crazy numbers in this chat. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/fewer-foreigners-visited-us...
More than 1.5 billion tourists spent $11.7 trillion on hotels, cruises and flights last year, according to the data from the World Travel and Tourism Council.
A fall of $12.5 billion is a lot but not something that will alter anything significant.
The majority of the people that are declining to travel to US are Example drops recorded:
Germany: ↓ 28% Spain: ↓ 25% UK: ↓ 18% Canada: ↓ 17% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_the_United_States
3. Some states and some countries are going the opposite (Argentina, Israel, two examples). https://skift.com/2025/12/29/us-international-travel-which-s...
4 .There is an offset by Americans traveling inside the US as well. https://www.thetravel.com/how-and-why-us-international-touri...
Overall, this is a small macro impact.
BTW, the irony is that they decided not to go to the US, but they are victims of the danger caused by the US anyway.
That said, I do see a lot of ads for domestic tourism to places that ordinarily would really have no need to advertise. Disney buying YouTube spots to persuade me,a US resident, to visit Florida seems remarkable. I suspect things are not rosy?
“Tourism” is not a separately-tracked sector in the data, but would be reflected in several of the tracked sectors ("Leisure and hospitality” particularly, but slices of the tourism spend would be in several of the other tracked sectors.)
With that said, I’m sure the US Iran conflict is going to have all kinds of fun effects.
Also of note, all four of those states are ‘Conservative’ havens…
tl;dw - They say Vegas visitor numbers are down, but profits are actually up. This is because the tourism industry there has refocused on higher end clientele
Here is much better quality reporting from NBC News with a breakdown per industry at 02:01 in the video:
"The U.S. economy lost 92,000 jobs in February, stoking labor market worries" - https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/2026-labor-market-s...
The most hysterically funny take on this is Cramer..( who else) and CBNC saying its AI...its NOT.
Only right now? The US touristic cities have been and continue to be the most expensive places in the world to visit by far, so most of the planet will never visit the US out of cost reasons alone, regardless of their views on $CURRENT_POLITICS.
Foreign tourism probably isn't large enough part of the US GDP to be making a dent in the US economy as a whole.
@WarmWash: where is the dollar collapsing? USD:EUR and USD:GBP are on par with where they were 10 years ago. Hardly a collapse. The people who can't afford flights and boarding in Vegas, Santa Monica or NY won't get any massive benefit from current currency fluctuations.
And international tourism supports local tourism. I think Las Vegas will continue to be a shell of what it was until international tourism rebounds.
BEA used to have these cool interactive tables on GDP by industry, but they’ve now been discontinued. It really feels like our current administration just does not like public data.
Some of the main categories (page 8 of the pdf):
- Construction: -11.0k
- Manufacturing: -12.0k
- Transportation and warehousing: -11.3k
- Private education and health services: -34.0k
- Information -11.0k
- Leisure and hospitality -27.0k
Contracts were heavily affected by cuts in federal programs that are critical to some rural regions, and uncertainty caused by inconsistent messaging about the future of such programs. Some areas are very dependent facilities that can only survive with public funding.
For example in nursing categories, CNOs (Chief Nursing Officers) would be requesting more staff, but CFOs would block those requests due to changing budget forecasts. The unpredictability of the fed is causing chaos downstream.
There is also a continuing trend to "realign" staff levels post-COVID, but that now is much easier to forecast for compared to the political chaos. In 2026 healthcare, that would not be a reason for attrition at these levels.
So that part could just be a blip. The rest seems on-trend.
The fact that it's such big part of the economy is a really bad thing because it's "overhead" or "broken windows" for the most part.
And it's falling because people are stretched thin so they're not going to the engaging healthcare unless they truly NEED it. Even if you have "great" insurance contacting that system still costs you money if not every time then on average.
I'm probably missing something here, but those seem quite unrelated categories, and I'm not sure why anyone would pay for private education these days when we all have access to free AI private tutors?
Plus cuts to the department of education, non profit spending in general.
That’s just a guess though.
Let's raise tariffs again.
It's rather more like someone going "based on the daily footfall numbers in my store, I expect sales to be up 1% this month" and the actual data being down 2%.
Well it's about to turn from theory to reality very soon.
Sadly my first thought was not to trust this report. The article even notes further down:
>> The US central bank would typically respond to a weakening labour market by cutting borrowing costs, in hopes of giving the economy a boost.
Our fearless leader has put enormous pressure on the Fed to lower interest rates from day 1. They keep refusing, and following the data so it makes sense (if you don't care about reality) to alter the data to get the desired result.
1/ the confidence interval for the monthly change in total nonfarm employment from the establishment survey is on the order of plus or minus 122,000
2/ the report is based upon a survey of establishments. There is no obligation to respond and many do not and ability/desire to respond may be impacted by company health as well.
oh and make old/ill people somehow work until they are sixty-five to get any food or medical assistance
that should fix things right up
xmas economic implosion inbound
They don't just fudge numbers a bit. This is a bad number for them because it's probably the correct (or best available, really) number produced by the existing bureaucracy that does things via the same rules it always has. Doesn't mean it won't be revised later (note that there's also a big downward revision in this report of previous numbers). But it's likely trustworthy.
Along with Big Lie polemics, you also need to recognize that the administration is very sensitive to market motion (sort of a variant kind of democracy, I guess). And markets HATE when the government messes with the economic regulatory aparatus.
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/11/nx-s1-5323155/economic-data-r...
That's direct pressure now to fudge/push the numbers before they come out. At the department level, there is usually a long culture of objective process to overcome, so it will probably start off subtle/small, but once they clear the old guard away they will report anything they want.
> the administration is very sensitive to market motion
Not exactly. The administration (Trump) is sensitive to embarrassment and criticism from his own side. Tanking markets are such an embarrassment, and while he might back down when markets tank, he might also do the the other thing he does to deflect embarrassment and criticism, which is to perpetrate some new outrage so that everyone complains about the new thing instead of the old thing.
And, of course, the markets will adjust. Iffy government numbers will get priced in.
You might like to believe there's a rational actor there, but there isn't. It's a guy moving from one gut reaction to the next, where his gut reaction is often to push everyone's buttons.
If someone can find this post, please link it here, because this person was no fan of Trump and I considered it a matter of considerable personal integrity that they looked into the matter and determined they still stood by the numbers, instead of taking the easy win on Bluesky and denouncing them.
(There is a separate issue where for the last 2-3 years, the BLS's later revisions to jobs numbers have been almost entirely downward, instead of evenly distributed like they used to be, indicating some kind of systemic methodological issue, maybe some secular change in how labor markets work post-covid. The February numbers could mean maybe they've fixed the problem, or maybe they haven't and this will later get revised to something even worse. But that issue predates Trump.)
https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...
Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (4.0 percent), adult women (4.1 percent), teenagers (14.9 percent), and people who are White (3.7 percent), Black (7.7 percent), Asian (4.8 percent), or Hispanic (5.2 percent) showed little or no change in February. (See tables A-1, A-2, and A-3.)
The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) changed little at 1.9 million in February but is up from 1.5 million a year earlier. The long-term unemployed accounted for 25.3 percent of all unemployed people in February. (See table A-12.)
Both the labor force participation rate, at 62.0 percent, and the employment-population ratio, at 59.3 percent, changed little in February. These measures showed little change over the year, after accounting for the annual adjustments to the population controls. (See table A-1. For additional information about the effects of the population adjustments, see the note at the end of this news release and table B.)
The number of people employed part time for economic reasons decreased by 477,000 to 4.4 million in February. These individuals would have preferred full-time employment but were working part time because their hours had been reduced or they were unable to find full-time jobs. (See table A-8.)
The number of people not in the labor force who currently want a job changed little in February at 6.0 million. These individuals were not counted as unemployed because they were not actively looking for work during the 4 weeks preceding the survey or were unavailable to take a job. (See table A-1.)
Among those not in the labor force who wanted a job, the number of people marginally attached to the labor force changed little at 1.6 million in February. These individuals wanted and were available for work and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months but had not looked for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. The number of discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached who believed that no jobs were available for them, decreased by 109,000 in February to 366,000. (See Summary table A.)
Washington is being buried in indefensibly bad legislation that is extremely hostile to large companies and tech companies of every size for openly ideological reasons. It has rapidly become one of the worst business environments in the country when it used to be one of the best. Many companies have stopped or reduced hiring in Seattle and are moving operations to other States; there is a new announcement in the news every other day.
I know several longtime residents that have recently moved out of State or are no longer domiciled there as a consequence. There was an article in the news just this week that housing prices are starting to decline rapidly in Seattle.
It is looking like they couldn't help themselves and killed the golden goose.
Like companies have been doing the RTO "stealth" layoffs for years now, it's not even news anymore, this was already well underway.
There is also the obvious priapism of owners and investors to finally do to the remaining white collar workers what they have already done to everyone else. Whether or not AI actually can replace all these workers is nearly moot, they have fantasized about business without labor for so long they can't tell the difference from reality anymore.
like what more clear point do you want?
Whether or not you believe that this is a good or bad move, correct or lying move, whether AI is capable or not,
“AI” is the reason that CEOs are utilizing to cut roles
The timing of this is based on the fact that Capital is striking from deploying money to anything else outside of the largest deals that include AI as promise of higher profits
But ultimately it comes down to the fact that the people in control with all the money believe that the future is gonna need less human workers and is prioritizing giving money to organisms that will shed their workforces in order to run an experiment in AI capturing value on behalf of investors without having the additional overhead of personnel
It's simple, as a technologist, you live in Europe if retirement isn't important for you. Because you'll have almost nothing to show for it after 30 years in tech in Europe.
We’ve been digging ourselves a giant AI-inflated hole in the economy for months and folks have just been playing musical chairs to grab as much money as possible before the music stops.
Hard to believe it’s taken this long. I never wanted to live through the late 70s / early 80s economically but I guess I’ll have my chance!
The reason the numbers are down should be pretty obvious.
Unless it is stopped the job losses will be absolutely massive, and a tiny tiny footnote to the massive human suffering that the stated mass deportation is intended to cause.
Some of those jobs will just disappear (resulting in job losses, which is what the headline is about), but unemployment (people looking for jobs and not finding them) is up.
It does mean economic contraction, but that's yet another number. That would show up in GDP, but that number is really slow to collect. Data so far is actually pretty smooth, but that's to be expected.
Indiscriminate tariffs means deindustrialization, unpredictable tariffs means stagnation (inability to grow).
Blatant corruption means stagnation.
Aggressive international relations means disruption of any market that touches the rest of the world (with loss of wealth). Active war means the same thing as mass deportation and non-productive spending, so more contraction.
Trump has an incredible ability to hit all the targets.
Trump is completely captured by business interests and is not America First. Mass immigration is the billionaire first position.
Younger generations understand this, so we likely won’t see some change for a bit, but it is coming. And it makes sense - they’re the ones suffering most from unfettered immigration. Their birthright is being handed out to cheap labor, because the billionaires running our society see us as cattle.
I really wish people would realize that prolonging this farce is not in their best interests. The energy potential of the inevitable blowback just keeps building.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/03/us-israel-iran...
The bigger question is the impact of immigration policies- the US population is smaller than expected due to immigration effects, so some of the extrapolation typically done may be skewed. I doubt this will make the numbers look better though. These numbers may be volatile for some time until the true effects of the lack of immigration are understood and modeled properly.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE/
I'd say the article overstates its point somewhat. The numbers (rise in unemployment) don't look to be caused by Trump alone (trend started before), but he most certainly did not improve the situation in his first year (numbers grew worse instead of better).
But the absolute numbers (<5%ish unemployment) are not especially concerning for now despite trending in the wrong direction (and all of Trumps policies seem to make things worse so far).
It seems like a stretch to say anyone was pro-actively fired on the speculation that a war could break out in the middle east; so the war is probably unrelated. That said, if the Strait of Hormuz stays closed for any length of time then something pretty drastic could happen to employment in the future tense.
Every person has their own lived experiences, I think it should be common courtesy to at least give someone who puts in the effort into writing a, respectful non ai generated, comment a fair shot and being read.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
I'd ignore the headline number and wonder what the longer term trend means because this isn't normal.
This stat makes a lot of sense for the most part. A stay-at-home parent isn't really unable to find work so shouldn't be counted in unemployment stats (for example).
But sometimes you miss the folk that have become disheartened. I know a few of those folk right now in the tech industry who want to look but just aren't. Our stats miss "mood" in a sense (hard to quantify of course).
But right now the mood is bad.
Apparently all 130k jobs came from the health care sector with everything else having no growth.
I wonder what a further breakdown of the data might show. The older (leading) boomers are starting to die off, so there might be a decline in needed care in the trailing boomers or something like that. Demographic change.
And we have a lot of economic, political, and geopolitical uncertainty.
So, if anything, I would be surprised if we don’t see this level of job reduction consistently for at least the rest of the year.
What is less clear to me is whether it will accelerate or whether it will continue for a few years.
I used Anthropic to analyze the situation, it did halfway decent:
The democrats lost the elections because of the economy. Gas prices were too high during Biden term.
My paranoia conspiracy theory is that somehow US will declare war on Iran at some point and elections will be postoned.
This is the new utopia.
After all, you're certain it is true.
Is the US producing more or fewer widgets? Are we generating and consuming more or less energy? How are imports and exports?
If inputs and outputs are staying the same then it would support the narrative of increased efficiency and elimination of BS jobs.
'normal part of the business cycle'
It is not a bad one. You can definitely argue it both ways.
I personally think there is a lot of self-inflicted pain ahead and position portfolio accordingly.
But seriously, antagonizing all of your trading partners and visitors so that tourism dies, your booze industry gets severely wounded, and making things expensive so the world's most efficient kleptocracy can keep feeding itself has some consequences, I guess.
Add to that the people who don’t understand that they are being fleeced and who’ll continue to support theire heroes because of pride, hatred, nihilism or misinformed idealism.
There is a vocal minority in the last bracket, but I’m convinced they are being amplified by an army of bots.
however due to the incompetent and corrupt powers that be - a lot of the news has been suppressed, and even the head of BLS fired.
everyone is struggling - but I guess the economy is doing well coz of the "stock market" as we're told
Really? Anyone here feel like the job market is thriving right now? Anyone surprised?
Bc I was like - yeah, totally, makes sense, not surprised at all.
If anything, I am waiting for that dreaded "business update" calendar invite from HR. I am already researching and taking notes on trade schools. Ready to punch that ticket any day now.
The longstanding heuristic is that the most important metric of how bad things are is if ADP < BLS. If government employment is declining it will make the BLS estimates look poor no matter what the rest of the economy is doing. I expect ADP will be negative too but it remains to be seen if it is higher or lower than the BLS number.
Not sure what number you are referring to here? 92K losses does _not_ show the full picture but no number that I know of is saying the half a million jobs are being added to the workforce every month.
A full picture of what? The metric gives us a full picture on how many jobs were added or lost in the month of February.
Let them eat cake.
BBC is really full style right wing propaganda machine now. This time propaganda by omission (like those articles about Brexit where they never gave "no Brexit" as an option).
Zero commentary on tariffs, zero commentary about tourism and ICE, nothing about other policies.
His net worth has grown over $4 billion since taking office again, and that doesn't count his sons or other insiders that have been taking bribes and making insider trades.
The single most corrupt politician we've ever had, with a family full of criminals.
As always with these losers, the Biden Crime family was purely projection.
In the recent Epstein releases, Epstein told Thiel that the best deals come from a system on the way to collapse. I think at this point it’s reasonable to consider that this is what Trump and his allies are trying to do. Crash the US economy so severely that they might use their ill-gotten wealth to buy an outsized portion of it.
Right…
