Lastly for now, on travel and tourism: recall that the Trump administration cited as a reason for the travel ban the necessity of a temporary ban while extreme vetting measures were putting in place. As
the NYT examines the changes that have happened to vetting since then, turns out there really haven't been many (they ask incoming people for social media accounts now, I guess?).
To give the administration some credit, the injunction against travel ban 2.0 prevented some of this review:
Quote:
But as the rules for admitting people from the six countries covered by the latest travel ban have remained almost entirely unchanged, officials have blamed a ruling by a federal judge who, in blocking the revised order, also prohibited the government from evaluating the risks of letting people enter from the affected countries.
In a legal brief on March 17, government lawyers asked the judge, Derrick K. Watson of United States District Court for the District of Hawaii, if he had meant to stop them from proceeding with the vetting review. In a reply two days later, the judge said yes.
...but the injunction against ban 1.0
didn't do that, and the administration didn't seem to give much of a **** about reviewing vetting procedures back then either:
Quote:
Critics note that the administration faced no such judicial restrictions after the first travel ban order was issued, and that it could have completed the 30-day review of vetting procedures for the seven countries that had been called for in that initial order. Officials said they began the review but did not finish it.
You tell me, conservatives: did Trump lie about needing changes to vetting, or does he just not give a **** about protecting Americans?
Meanwhile, the damaging legacy of the ban lives on in our tourism industry:
U.S. travel industry has to go into damage control mode at annual international conference
Quote:
“I know many of you are saying, ‘I wonder if the U.S. even welcomes me anymore,’ ” Roger Dow, chief executive of the U.S. Travel Association, said to more than 1,300 foreign travel writers, tour operators and wholesale travel providers. “And on behalf of the U.S. travel industry, I’d like to give you an answer: We want you here. We want you to send your friends here. We all welcome you.”
Quote:
The hospitality industry, once optimistic that a hotelier would be leading the country, has in recent months slipped into quiet desperation at the prospect of dwindling revenue.
“We think it’s about two-and-a-half million jobs in the U.S. [that are] directly dependent on foreign tourists arriving to the United States,” Arne Sorenson, the chief executive of Marriott International, said on CNBC last week.
Quote:
But now came the difficult part: Encouraging foreigners to visit the United States at a time when the country’s president seemed to be doing the opposite.
...
“None of us doubts the feelings of Americans in general,” said Jen Savedra, editor of Travel Industry Today, an online publication based in Toronto. “But when the president is tweeting about how people aren’t welcome in the country, a lot of people are saying, ‘Why? We’ll go to Mexico or the Dominican Republic instead.’ ”