How Trump Policies Are Hurting Hospitality Industry

Nearly all the talk – at least in the media that we read – about how President Trump's travel policies have impacted hospitality has focused on their impact on employment.

But an article in Friday's Inside Higher Ed (IHE) notes that this year's meeting of the Academy of Management, one of the largest meetings of business scholars, will have only 7,000 attendees when it takes place in Philadelphia July 31 instead of the usual 14,000. And next year's meeting is being moved to Vienna from Seattle, Wash.

Why? Because of President Trump's policies. IHE quotes a professor at the International School of Management in Germany as saying he has attended every year since 2009. But not this year. The "adversarial" atmosphere in the U.S. deterred him.

“Foreign-born scholars in the U.S. have been detained or deported (or threatened with deportation), visiting scholars are scanned for their social media activities, and the attitude towards any scientific endeavor connected to fields I care about (mostly sustainability, climate, energy transformation) can only be described as hostile,” he said.

“I don’t feel welcome in the U.S., and I cannot imagine how it must feel for colleagues from the Middle East or Africa.”

A British-Iranian academic who wished to remain anonymous told IHE travel restrictions and political uncertainty made the trip untenable for him. 

IHE said he also cited a U.S. government proposal to screen the five-year social media history of visitors from dozens of countries, including the U.K. “Officers would be able to check [researchers’] social media and if they find something expressed against the [U.S. government], they will be stopped from entering,” he said. Many of his colleagues decided not to attend because of this, he added.

Comment: This is 7,000 people who will not be bring their money to support American workers families and employers, a direct result of President Trump's policies, not just travel policies but other policies as well. Most of those 7,000 people won't be drinking American made beer, wine or spirits, so they also won't be supporting the U.S. bev/al industry, which at the moment can use all the help it can get.

There are huge academic conferences like this nearly every week of the year, so you can imagine how this is being repeated week after week – foreign scholars staying away and conferences moving overseas so that next year and years thereafter American dollars will be supporting other countries hospitality industries.