It's one thing to refuse entry to someone who doesn't have the right documents. The fear goes to a completely different level once people see tourists getting locked up.
As someone who lived in the US for 22 years legally and most of my social and business network there, I an not taking the risk of getting locked up in ICE jail any time soon, no matter how unlikely it is.
I won't be visiting the US for the foreseeable future (used to go several times per year for work), just not worth the risk.
Out of curiosity, what do you think it's like to travel to Europe as someone who is dark-skinned, has a beard, and does not have a European passport?
When I traveled last time, I have witnessed an European denied entry for a reason I don't know, and a white male without any beard has been escorted into the immigration office.
Said office had a giant window. The officers were just chatting with him while checking his documents, and also drinking some coffee and eating some cake. I didn't look that long to see whether they have offered the same to him (because it's rude).
Also, I don't have an EU/UK/US passport, and I just pass fine.
For some EU perspective: last summer we traveled with a group of social dancers from Berlin to Pula in Croatia, going to an event at the coast.
Croatia joined Schengen in January 2023.
We had one couple in the group that where not "white". She is German but her parents are Vietnamese and he is from Syria. They're married, they have German citizenship.
They were the only ones from our group of ~20 people who got singled out and had their papers and luggage (!) checked. She looks Asian, he looks Middle-Eastern (oh, and he has a beard!).
That said, they just took 10mins longer to make it through the arrivals hall. They didn't get incarcerated.
However, the year before they were traveling to a dance event in Belgrade. That was was before they got married so he didn't have a German passport yet. He only had a Syrian passport and a residence permit for Germany/Schengen.
Serbia is not part of the EU. Usually such a mistake means they just send you back on the next flight. Happened to two friends of mine, both "white US citizens, who didn't also know this and were traveling to Belgrade from Switzerland two years before.
My Syrian friend however spent three days in a jail in cell with a dozen criminals before they let him fly back to Germany. Mind you, the event they went to was four days and he had a return ticket that could have been easily changed to the arrival day.
Racial profiling is everywhere. Also in the EU. And some EU countries are more "famous" for it, the Balkans e.g.
> Serbia is not part of the EU
> Racial profiling is everywhere. Also in the EU.
I didn't want to imply this was anyhow tied to Brussels.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accession_of_Serbia_to_the_Eur...
Though my point was that as someone who's moved into a EU country, it might not be entirely clear that it's not inside EU, given it's proximity and that they might have read about it in an EU context given its status.
Heck I'm in Norway and had to check to make sure I was right.
Of course, second time around there's no excuse.
Some countries are more "famous" for it, but that's really just a matter of perception and how it fits into an existing narrative, not based on actual evidence.
It's not like there's data showing that racial profiling is lower in France, Germany, and Sweden than it is in Eastern Europe.
Depends on which part of Europe. In the more diverse parts, nobody would bat an eyelid (even if border police might profile you).
EU Eastern Europe, you might get funny looks but it's still not an extraordinary situation to have various shades of skin colour (e.g. Syrians, various Central Asians are migrant workers in a few of the countries in question; a lot of e.g. the Balkans are on a palette of skin colours).
Non-EU Eastern Europe (referring more to Belarus than Montenegro here), might get casual racism.
Nobody will throw you in jail in indefinite detention in another country with no human rights because of your skin colour, beard, tattoos or anything of the like. Other than of course the usual suspects of Belarus, Russia, Azerbaijan and etc. who could for any reason.
As a person who matches the description above, and has traveled to Europe extensively and frequently, I can tell you that as much as Europeans like to believe this is this case, it is absolutely not true.
> Nobody will throw you in jail in indefinite detention in another country with no human rights because of your skin colour, beard, tattoos or anything of the like. Other than of course the usual suspects of Belarus, Russia, Azerbaijan and etc. who could for any reason.
Unless you're making some extremely critical assumptions about how much wear the word "indefinite" can bear, this is unfortunately not true either.
Now, officially the shengen zone means there's no need to show your documents between countries. But countries still don't want certain people coming in. And they don't want drugs smuggled in either.
It was really interesting who they decided to pull aside for a chat. It was almost always men who were travelling alone. Almost always men who were in the 25-45 age range. And I wouldn't be surprised if there was some racial profiling going on as well. The police never questioned me - probably because I was with my girlfriend the whole time. If she wasn't there, I bet I would have been pulled aside every time too.
Anyway, I believe your experience in Europe. But if you were a man travelling alone, its possible it was partially or fully due to that. For about a decade, every time I went through security at an airport I was always "randomly selected" to have my bag swabbed for chemicals. It never happens any more, and I'm as white as they come. I assume it was a gender + age + travelling alone thing - but its still a mystery to me.
I'm white, male. I travel to some lower-income countries for work. I can dress like a neat, well-paid software developer with the €2000 laptop and €1000 camera in my bag. I'll sail through security in Europe and at the destination, then have a horde of people hassling me for a taxi, sometimes pretty aggressively, and I feel I stand out as an easy target for robbery.
Instead, I wear some old, faded clothes for the journey. Then I get the "random" drug swab check in Europe, border control at the destination might ask to see my hotel booking, but the taxi drivers and street kids will ignore me as another cheakskate backpacker.
That is not what it means.
Checks became way more frequent.
Since EU has problems with the illegal immigration, there are some checks and they happen more frequently.
Most EU country police don’t need probable cause to detain you. It does happen to be detained for no reason outside of profiling. For example, in France, you can be sent to jail for up to 24h with no probable cause.
And as you describe in the EU it's "up to 24 hours". And in the lawless authoritarian regime? That Canadian girl was detained for 11 days and was told to prepare to be held for months: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/jasmine-moon...
A friend's family flew into a EU country with a letter, they thought this letter was their visa but it turned out to be a rejection from the EU country's consulate (maybe it was a request for more information for their visa application). They were denied entry, but there was no indefinite detention, they were just told to get on the next plane out of the country and had to wait in the "international area" of the airport until said flight.
There must be a probable cause : https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F14837
In the US you need probable cause to get pull over or temporary detain you. In France, you don't need probably cause for temporary detaining you, but if they suspect you of something they can also send you to jail. You can't be sent to jail in the US just on them just suspecting something.
All the people sitting in an Salvadorian prison for having a shitty tatoo would strongly disagree.
But this admin highly disagrees with that notion. Really hope the courts start throwing heads sooner rather than later.
I can answer that! It is pretty uneventful. My experience with the border checks in airports was always very pleasant (despite the lines, depending on the airport they can be pretty long)
Now I am not saying we are uniform half a billion, not at all, wear burka in eastern EU in some small backwardish village and you will raise eyebrows and maybe more. Try that in US and its the same, to put it mildly.
We discriminate based on what country you're from. =)
[0] I am well aware there is racism in Europe, it's just ... different here.
With a Canadian or American passport (until recently)? No problem.
With an Iranian passport? Probably more problems.
First of all, the folks profiling and detaining you don't ask you where your passport is from first - they'll generally make the decision and then ask for your documentation.
But even then, I have a US passport, and I've had far more issues being detained in European airports than I have in the US - which is really saying something.
It depends. Most countries do have certain kinds of extra policies for passports of certain countries. For example, Visa fraud, especially for education visas, is extremely common from India. So extra checks for those that the acceptance letter isn't from some diploma mill and that they're not coming to work illegally tends to to occur more often.
But the same is true for local citizens that make odd, quick trips to certain countries that tend to be sources for drug smuggling - you're going to probably get pulled aside.
Being a border guard is 40% art, 40% science, 10% luck, and 10% other.
> But even then, I have a US passport, and I've had far more issues being detained in European airports than I have in the US - which is really saying something.
You're a citizen, though. Unless they think you're importing something you shouldn't, you're far less likely to be hassled as you have more rights than others.
As a Canadian, I found that Canadian border agents tend to harass their own citizens, especially at land crossings, because the default assumption seems to be we're trying to dodge paying duties.
I've found American border guards mostly tend to act terse and rude (possibly as a strategy to try and trip you up?), though some of the nicest I've ever met were also American. I've found most EU guards with my Canadian passport to be bored and slow, though that may be because most Canadians going to Europe are just vacationing?
That's not relevant when, as I said, they detain you without knowing what passport you even hold.
> You're a citizen, though. Unless they think you're importing something you shouldn't, you're far less likely to be hassled as you have more rights than others.
Being a citizen does not, in fact, exempt you from being profiles and detained at border crossings, either in the US or in Europe.
From my point of view, if POTUS blathers about annexing Canada, then the US doesn't deserve my tourist dollars, neither my Netflix subscription, neither my Amazon prime subscription. I've cut back on purchases/subscriptions from US companies as much as it was possible for me and my family. Also cancelled a trip to south east US. Purely out of spite.
They just view America itself as the problem and are deciding to detach from it as a whole.
(another one to watch out for: opiate painkillers in your hand luggage into Middle Eastern states, including Dubai.)
If there's the slightest possibility that what he says is not bullshit, then Canada needs to take it very seriously and the entire northern hemisphere security architecture needs to permanently change.
Now that it's a political issue, rather than a logistical matter, so it's no longer professional or civilised, no thanks. I have one US customer and thankfully Google Meet is enough, because I'm not getting anywhere near the US for them. I can find other customers if I have to, but I don't think legal fees for navigating the oh-we-totally-had-good-reason-to-think-he-was-a-terrorist-your-honour jail are as easily deductible. As for leisure, haha, no, there are plenty of things to see all over the world where the chances of getting jailed because you said the wrong thing about the wrong president are much smaller. My visa expires this year, I'm not planning to renew it any time soon.
I think that the risk of being imprisoned without due process is very low, but still substantially higher than in any other Western country, and certainly high enough not to justify the risk.
I also think that the risk of being temporarily imprisoned with due process, until they figure out that I haven't broken any law anywhere, is also very low, but still substantially higher than in most Western countries. And certainly high enough that it's not worth the risk.
I don't have an issue with border controls being a thing. I'm not a free travel idealist. I get why border controls exist, I think the premise of not letting people in unless they provably meet the host country's requirement is perfectly reasonable, and I certainly think that, even if someone did nothing wrong and just doesn't have their documentation in order, sending them back home on the first flight is an entirely reasonable thing to do. I just think that, in the current political climate, both the chances of being the victim of good old abuse and the chances of well-meaning ICE personnel screwing up are too high to be worth crossing the Atlantic for.
I do not think most people can conceive just how common and deranged the situation is, and that not only that the documentation is so poor and that most of the people this happens to will not speak up, either because no one will believe them or because they are not a citizen and are afraid it will result in reprisal.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/us/chinese-woman-detained...
None of that happens at the border.
At this stage it doesn't even matter whether you have broken any U.S. law or not.
I would certainly no longer do US travel for a conference on a tourist visa in case that's deemed "work". (pop quiz to Americans: what visa do I need for that situation, and how difficult is it to get?)
I'd be interested in alternate viewpoints since I may be in a bleeding-heart, empathetic, progressive, consequence-considering news bubble.
My reasoning is that a family member who lives in the US said that they feel protected / insulated because they're in a deep blue state. I don't feel this is representative of reality, or at least they should be more alarmed than they sounded.
Exactly.
Americans generally don't understand the degree to which the rest of the world gets the CNN 5min recap of what's going on in the US, and it's very much the CNN recap and not the Fox one.
"Tourists locked up, school children shot, government defunded, California on fire, tune in at 11 for more".
The fact that ~half the country doesn't think ICE should be locking up tourists without good reason and the other ~half doesn't think ICE should be locking up anyone gets skipped.
Edit: Just to head off the nitpickers, by "good reason" I mean stuff that border guards of any nation would lock anyone up for if they found, regardless of visa type, status or nation or origin.
For me, Coke tastes like acid, and Dr. Pepper is sweet and spicy.
But... uh... that doesn't translate well when applied to sources for "news".
Also, I'd like to emphasize what someone said elsewhere in this comments section: the rest of the world doesn't see the US through the "CNN vs Fox" lens, that's almost exclusively an American phenomenon.
Ubiquitous (distribution) versus relatively limited (distribution).
I think the crime rate is a major concern for every tourist.
Doesn't Florida have a much lower crime rate than California? As a tourist, I rather visit Florida than California.
I don't think that's true—or at least, not a strong correlation. Crime rates were going significantly down since the early 90s, regardless who is in power. There was a smaller spike during COVID years, which has I believe returned to normal.
> I think the crime rate is a major concern for every tourist.
It is, but it isn't the only concern, and ICE sending tourists to prison is by definition not a crime, but is just as relevant to potential tourists.
> As a tourist, I rather visit Florida than California.
I really don't think you really want to look at the state level crime rates, you should look at the crime rate for the place you're going to visit. For instance, the violent crime rate in Florida was 260 per 100k people in 2022 (according to Wikipedia)... but if you're going to Walt Disney World, specifically: it's a whole lot less.
Federally? There's no reason to think the federal government changing hands would impact local crime rates. Overall violent crime has seen steady decline from the 1970s to the present day. [1] That period has seen both Democratic and Republican administrations.
At the state level it's a different picture. 8 of the top 10, and 17 of the top 25 states for homicide rate are "red" states.[2] I think poverty and per-capita income rates in a state are a better predictor of crime rates than which party is specifically in power.
> Doesn't Florida have a much lower crime rate than California?
If you consume exclusively right-wing news media (or your favorite social media ragebait) you'd have that impression. Depending on your source they're either about equal (FBI stats) over the past 2 decades or Florida's murder rate is higher (CDC).[2] Either way it is not "much lower". For "much" lower I'd go to states like Massachusetts, Utah, or Hawaii which have murder rates closer to Western Europe.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Cri...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
> Doesn't the crime rate go down when Republicans hold the power?
Does it? And what about police brutality? As a tourist, I'd rather go to a country where I'm less likely to be treated badly by the police.
> As a tourist, I rather visit Florida than California.
I think this in general has very little to do with crime rates. There are confounding factors. I'd rather not visit Florida regardless of crime rate.
Why would the police treat you bad? I you don't commit any crime it's most likely you have nothing to do with the police.
It's not true, in general, that police won't treat you badly as long as you don't commit a crime. (As an aside, you also have to interact with police officers if you've been the victim of a crime, and again, there's no guarantee they'll treat you well in this situation either).
Same with border officers.
Of course most Americans don't want random people detained. But still, this is happening in the US.
And one thing that I believe is absolutely clear outside the US (whether it's true or not), is that most Americans are perfectly fine with "America First". Americans don't really care about the impact of Trump on the rest of the world; they care about the impact on themselves. Boycotting US products is a way to impact the American people, in the hope that the American people will eventually realise that what's best for them is also better for the others.
Something that I found interesting: when Canadians started booing the US anthem in NHL games, Americans started booing the Canadian anthem. Why? Canada didn't do anything to the US. Does it sound that most Americans are against what's happening, when they defend it? There is this kind of American patriotism where people seem to be like "Yes, my government, is bullying you, but I won't admit it and I will fight against you if you say it. But I'm a good guy, I don't want my government to bully you. I'll just support it because it's my country".
So yeah... pretty sure that it feels a lot different from the outside than from the inside.
I agree with everything you said, except this. Sub “many” and I’d go with it. But at least here, in blue state / more-sane land, there is widespread horror and outrage. We’re only at the “tens of thousands of people protesting” stage and I’ll be the first to say Americans need to do more, but I think it’s going to far to say most Americans don’t care about the impact elsewhere.
Indeed.
Recently in Palo Alto for a few months. Saw lots of people protesting Tesla dealerships, lots of interesting and creative anti-Trump and Elon signs.
Not one word of Canada, of Greenland. Trumps stated goal of destroying Canada's economy to force annexation, or to outright just take Greenland seem not protest worthy.
Most people I spoke to seemed barely conscious of the issue.
To be fair, other matters may be higher pri in their minds, so if other events were not happening in parallel, it may be different.
But when 65 billion dollar defence hardware purchases are being dropped (they are), when future military purchases are not going to happen, when police cars, municipal vehicles are not going to be from US companies any more, when natural resources are going to be sold to the EU and China instead (sadly), the US is going to feel this for a very long time.
Because these are choices for decades. And it's not only Canada making them.
You don't have to deeply care about Canada to oppose annexation threats.
> Don't tell me Canadians lose sleep thinking about the well being of US.
A Canadian prime minister said Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.[1]
A partnership goes both ways. Caring about a partner is caring about yourself.
Doesn‘t look much different from Russian, Israeli or Chinese patriotism. When outsiders criticize your tribe for doing bad things, many are standing in support of the tribe, not the values, and they are the most visible.
I don't know if that's strictly accurate. United States citizens are some of the most heavily disenfranchised in the western world. Our oligarchs have spent decades making it more difficult to vote, especially for people of color, who overwhelmingly disapprove of the current administration. In some urban areas, it can take hours of standing in line to vote, and we don't get time off from work to do so. We've also had a decades long propaganda campaign telling us our vote doesn't matter.
More people didn't vote in the last election than voted for Trump. That's not to say they all would have voted against him, but it's not really the will of the American people.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-approval-rating-now-...
As a Canadian who normally travels to the US 3-4 times a year, that tells me everything I need to know about what "most Americans" think.
Try to remember our weird Electoral College, and that ultimately the vote came down to ~230,000 votes in swing states. (I'm in one of them, and I voted against the felon.)
Also hate that "mainstream news" like ABC and CBS covered Saturday's protests with the phrase "tens of thousand" while the protest organizations reported MILLIONS of protesters (about 1% of the population.)
That state of affairs is utterly unacceptable, and signals that overwhelmingly the country doesn't get it yet. Look at how many Greenlanders like Trump— those are the numbers you need to be pulling at home. Once 80-90% of the US population agrees that he's not only a bad president but a threat to democracy and a criminal, then we can talk about feeling safe to travel there again.
And zero judgement of anyone's wise decision to avoid or boycott our country, or arm themselves against us.
Also don't know what to think of polls, but anything above 0% approving of Trump is stupid. It's still not "most", which is my only contention. But whether or not it's most doesn't matter as long as all of our checks and balances have disintegrated, and there's one person in charge and making horrible decisions that hurt many Americans, threaten tourists, and are currently wreaking havoc on the stability of the global economy.
Granted I don't blame foreigners for not risking ICE abuse. And Hockey fans can just be dumb sometimes. A lot of Americans have severe recency bias, the right is saying "the same people telling you this will be catastrophic were the same ones who locked down schools over a cold and told you inflation would be transitory". These people are going to have to touch the stove to learn it's hot, and then they'll admit that it's hot but deny that it's burning them, and then enough at the margins will start to defect such that they start losing elections, leaving a hard-core to endlessly complain about how if they'd only held on until 3rd degree burns the stove would have turned itself off.
I haven't. I am just telling how I believe it is perceived from outside the US. It seems like Americans here find it a bit excessive for tourists to choose not to come to the US "just because of a mistake at the border". I'm trying to say that from the outside, the US is behaving at least like a big bully, sometimes like an enemy. You don't go on vacation in a country that threatens to attack you militarily.
You would think that a country with a whole department devoted to government efficiency could work that out.
No, it's a small-ish minority of them. Most are government owned and run.
That said, there's a huge incentive to piss away money holding people so you can justify your budget and use poor conditions to justify increases in budget. And on top of that the contractors that supply government jails are pretty evil too.
So it's really a distinction without a difference at the end of the day, it's all a pretty rotten system.
But yes, there are incentives that do reward cells and even individuals for number of imprisonments. And no, they do not check nor punish "administrative errors".
Taxpayers are paying the private companies, but they're very much for profit.
About that:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2025/01/29/billi...
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/03/private-prison-...
https://afsc.org/newsroom/ice-signs-massive-contract-profit-...
As has been a rising sentiment as of late: "The cruelty is the point"
You're right that it isn't efficient in any sense. But the kinds of people who go into and are chosen for "law enforcement" tend to be the very people that should never be given a weapon. It's just a large scale Stanford Experiment in that regard.
That is not remotely a good faith representation of the controversy.
... not that these things would make it safer to travel to the US. In the short run.
The status quo of power is that it is less safe to be a foreigner in the US than it has been in a long time. Possibly at any point in time the US wasn't actively at war with another nation.
Still wishing citzens manage to get control of the country back, before the administration adopts even stronger control mechanisms.
I am from Europe. I don't think I look different than an American.
You want foreign readers to read news about how half of the US wants you, the foreign tourist, be locked up in a jail cell? The news is already out there. Everyone assumes it's so wanted, because well... it does actually happen
"ICE goes crazy looking for crimes, hapless tourists caught up in the boondoggle"
and
"ICE detaining tourists for no good reason"
Are both 100% true ways to headline the same events. Which framing is Europe getting?
This is something to watch out for on all issues, not just immigration/foreign affairs.
If you're worried, though, that "ICE goes crazy" is an underrepresented perspective in the rest of the world, I can reassure you on that count...
So ...?
No, Americans generally don't understand that the rest of the world, and the rest of the world's news, genuinely don't see things in this dual "us vs them", "CNN vs Fox", "Democrats vs Republicans" lens.
When Trump does shit, media from around the world say what he did and why it's bad.
When Biden or Obama before him did shit, media from around the world say what he did and why it's bad.
Fox are genuinely deranged hypocrites who themselves claimed in court that nobody sane would believe them. Very few of the world's media reflect their point of views, because they are absurd. CNN is all over the place, so sometimes their point of view matches with e.g. BBC or Guardian or Süddeutsche Zeitung, sometimes it doesn't.
I think the consensus is that if the rest of the world grows a spine it will emerge far stronger and the US a weaker state to before - akin to change the British Empire post ww2 compared with before, probably with the same glee they saw the British Empire falling.
What worries me is which side the US (government, not people) would choose to support if EU states send troops to Ukraine's front lines, which would absolutely instigate a Russian response.
(Trump wouldn't like that the little EU states are messing with his negotiations for the shrinking and pillaging of Ukraine, and Trump is, if nothing else, vengeful).
Last time Europe tried to do something to reduce reliance on America in 2019, America threatened Europe with sanctions
https://www.dw.com/en/us-warns-eu-over-13-billion-defense-sp...
> The United States has decried "poison pills" embedded in proposed rules which could shut third country allies such as the United States out of European defense projects.
> US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland emphasized the point in a letter and warned of possible US sanctions: "I hope we can avoid contemplating similar courses of action," he said. The EU has been asked to respond to the letter by June 10.
This is of course despite the fact most EU defence spending has always gone straight into the US economy.
> "The EU is actually at the moment much more open than the US procurement market is for the European Union companies and equipment," Mogherini said in Brussels. "In the EU there is no 'buy European' act and around 81% of international contracts go to the US firms in Europe today."
My 2 cents - wanted to take family on a trip to western US, parks and maybe SF, not in fucking hell now or in next 2 decades. I know its just some tiny drop in the bucket, but that ~10k spent locally in those few weeks will be spent elsewhere and if enough people will do the same (which they will do), tourism will suffer a bit. Maybe US folks will go there more, who knows (US tourists are still very welcome in Europe, we just hate the people you vote in because they clearly hate us).
> What's wrong with El Salvador? Isn't it a diverse country with wonderful people?
You are also incorrect in your last 2 sentences but no point breaking it down, that much I've learned in past few years with various versions of maga supporters (yes, we have them in Europe too, they usually vote ultra right pro russian and/or obviously corrupt populists).
Even the Biden administration was going out of its way to not push Russia too far. None of The Powers That Be in the US are interested in stumbling into WW3 with Russia, over Ukraine. Stumbling into WW3 with China, over Taiwan? Maybe. So I'd say Europe should approach such a decision from the assumption that you will receive no support from the US if you go down that road. If Europe wants to send its men to the killing fields of the Ostfront, it's on its own.
Assuming Europe, collectively, can even change the balance of power on the ground is also a stretch. Even some of the larger established militaries in Europe don't have the bodies to move the needle in this fight. The British Army, for example, has woefully understrength infantry battalions and is struggling with enlistment.[1][2] France claims they can put a division into the field [3] but I doubt that, probably more like a reinforced brigade (~5,000). I really don't get the impression European civil society is ready for hundreds or thousands of bodies to start coming back home either, but I could be wrong on that.
Meanwhile Russia inducted ~440,000 men last year, beating recruiting goals courtesy of MASSIVE cash enlistment bonuses, and still expects to grow their end strength this year as well.[4]
[1] https://x.com/Mrgunsngear/status/1908330593005322480
[2] https://www.euronews.com/2025/02/27/can-the-british-military...
[3] https://www.ausa.org/articles/french-army-transforms-close-c...
[4] https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-beating-military-recr...
They don't have a meaningful military but they have very big mouths. I don't think they are so stupid to enter a war they will surely lose.
Of course it is. Because the chance of a global recession is about 50% now.
Which means millions of people are going to lose their jobs, businesses will collapse, governments will go into deficit and cut services and there will be needless suffering only a few years after COVID.
It’s funny how quickly you realize the bad guys are both sides.
I say this because often when trying to interpret media i feel the language and accent of the presenter influences me. “They sound like me” therefore i start with an assumption they think like me. Rarely anyone in fox thinks like me.
(I retrospectively put the high point of recent West-China relations some time around the release of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_at_Lake_Changjin , which is an obvious propaganda war film with Americans on the "enemy" side .. that was shown in Western cinemas. Certainly in the UK, I think in America as well. Very odd. BTW, MOSFILM is on Youtube if you need some classic Russian cinema)
They're in a bubble.
Bubbles are great till they pop.
You seem to be focusing on what's obviously not the focus of the commentary. Which is an interesting data point in and of itself.
Finnish has always been gender-neutral: https://finland.fi/han/article/
Chinese and Japanese also do not have grammatical gender. Chinese imported gendered pronouns about a century ago for ease of translating Western gendered languages, but both languages tend to either refer to people by name or have no word at all and infer from sentence structure.
Basically: behaviour at US borders has been iffy for a lot longer than some folks might think.
Non-citizens at US points of entry have very limited constitutional protection. SCOTUS has consistently held that the federal government has broad authority over immigration and border control. Basically nobody has a 1st or 2nd amendment protection at a border crossing, and non-citizens have further-restricted 4th and 5th amendment protections among others.
Border agents do not need any level of suspicion or probably cause to search your person or your effects. Failing to answer questions can result in entry being denied. US v. Ramsey held that everyone, citizen or not, has no inherent right to enter the US at a particular point of entry on a particular date and time and that basically any search is "reasonable" due to national security and law enforcement needs. That ruling was half a century ago.
Shaughnessy v. US ex rel. Mezei (1953) held that even a lawful resident who is re-entering the country after an absence can be denied re-entry without a hearing as long as that denial is lawful. Mezei lived in the US as a lawful immigrant from 1923 to 1948 then went back to Hungary for just over a year and a half. A 1924 law classified him as an "excludable alien" when he returned in 1950 he was permanently barred from re-entry. This was before LPR status was codified so I imagine there is more relevant case law to that classification specifically.
SCOTUS has consistently held multiple distinctions between citizens and non-citizens at the border: Citizens have an absolute right to enter the country, non-citizens (including LPRs) do not. Everyone loses most 4A protections at points of entry, but citizens have a reasonableness bar that non-citizens do not (US v. Montoya de Hernandez 1985, US v. Flores-Montano 2004). Citizens still enjoy due process while non-citizens do not (Shaughnessy again, Kwong Hai Chew v. Colding 1953). Citizenship ensures someone is not in a legal limbo status of being detained unreasonably or indefinitely (Boumediene v. Bush 2008), a non-citizen denied entry without the means to leave is basically stuck there. Citizens are presumed able to enter the country and have faster processing, all non-citizens including LPRs must prove admissibility every time.
So there's a century (or more) of case law supporting what some might call extreme power on the part of the federal government to deny non-citizens entry at any port of entry, for any or no reason. But what it boils down to is whether there are any countries in the world that don't have this policy? There is no country in the world where as a non-citizen I enjoy the same rights and legal recourse as a citizen if I am denied entry, and no country where it is not on me to affirmatively prove to the border agent(s) that I am legally permitted entry. It is always a privilege to enter a country other than your own.
Edit: At the risk of breaking guidelines and making for boring reading, I have to question the odds of someone being able to read this comment in ~30 seconds, process the argument, and decide its worth a downvote vs. "oh I don't like this first sentence."
Specifically, "disappeared for a few days" is not at all what basically every country on the planet does.
The GP frames this as the US doing something nobody else does, which is objectively false, and even if his specific example is an egregious violation of someone's rights I'm sure if we looked through the last 25 years of immigration detentions for other countries we could pick out something equally upsetting from each one.
Also, things can be legal and iffy at the same time (indeed, such wide-ranging powers basically invite that, since they give wide latitude to go overboard in cases that do not deserve it).
This means if you're going to be denied entry it will probably be in Dublin which will make it a preferred airport of origin within the EU -- this is massively more convenient than getting stuck in JFK.
But. The mechanical processes can include indefinite detention in facilities that look and function exactly like jails.
So... what you CALL it is almost certainly something different than what it is.
For what it's worth, we're also starting to have similar (though so far less pronounced) reactions to domestic travel. There's a number of states that are unsafe to travel to if you or someone in your family has a gender identity that's not on the approved list--and that has an outsize effect. I won't go to those places since they don't deserve my tax dollars, and am just jumping on a bandwagon of plenty of other people in making that decision.
For this Summer we wanted to visit my sister, so we bought tickets last December. I've always been pretty vocal about my dislike for Trump too. Well, for the first time, I'm worried that, when traveling to the US, some overzealous TSA agent could ask me to get access to my social media accounts, and that I could be refused entry, or even get sent to one of those wonderful privately owned jails; you know, for lèse-majesté. I reckon that the risk is too little to warrant us canceling our trip, but honestly, if I didn't have my tickets already, I would probably not have bought them now.
This is the craziest timeline.
Having said that, weigh up the benefits and drawbacks of scrubbing your social media accounts to minimise that particular concern?
I don't have any, so I don't know what I'd be losing, but I can say that I feel sorry for some family members of mine who have been sucked in to the social media dopamine addiction farm. They'd be better off without it and having more time to be their own selves and live their own lives rather than other people's.
/rant (sorry)
(A similar service exists for Cayman Island holding companies IIRC)
I've been a vocal Trump supporter on social media. By this measure they should give me a green card if I'll ever plan to visit US.
I've turned down a 7-day-all paid-trip my company was offering me to San Francisco for this (and I had in the past a bad experience at Puerto Rico's border).
In Australia, we just had someone [1] who was detained for 8 hours with their phone/laptop searched all because they stopped over in Hong Kong rather than flying direct to the US.
It's that kind of irrational, unpredictable behaviour that makes travellers stay away and instead choose from one of the hundreds of other desirable travel destinations who want you to visit.
[1] https://www.smh.com.au/traveller/travel-news/an-australian-w...
It's just a 4 days trip, but I have an entire family that needs me to come back and not sent for a decade to a random overseas prison.
We read about it, too. It just seems absolutely nobody close to power is willing to do anything to even tap the brakes.
Trump can't even keep track of who started the war in Ukraine...
People don't realize how much good will is being toss aside.
At this point it's also about standing with our countrymen and spending our tourist dollars at home.
They appear to be testing the boundaries by going after easy targets.
They don't know or don't think canadians takes this seriously and it's not fucking funny.
I wouldn't take any risks either.
Sending them to foreign prison camps instead is in fact a crime against humanity.
Why would someone end up in a jail if he doesn't break any law?
And they shouldn't. As far as I know, those cases of German getting locked up media coverage was intense, but the stories didn't check out. Those were cases of Germans entering by foot via Tijuana, making condracting claims to the ICE officer - raising suspicions with those officers. In case of entering the US by plane, I haven't seen and credible articles that resulted in detention.
(It’s not clear to me if he has been released. The last media reports are from two weeks ago)
"Schmidt’s green card was allegedly tagged for him failing to attend a hearing because the invitation was sent to his old address, according to the family’s fundraiser to cover Schmidt’s legal costs and loss of earnings.
“To compound this error, he had just recently been provided with a new replacement Green Card since he had lost the original one,” the fundraising page says. “Even then U.S. Immigration failed to let him know that there was an outstanding hearing which he had missed and that his card would be tagged.”"
Source: https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2025/03/21/family-of-...
A system that demands absolute perfection from me is still not one I’d want to encounter.
The reverse scenario is happening too. There are americans that refuse to go to europe because of the examples they seen of immigrants committing crimes and ruining neighborhoods.
As someone who spends a lot of time on both locations, I know that both scenarios are rare, and can logically overcome the emotional response after seeing examples online. But for people who don't travel much I understand.
As much as the scenarios can be rare, there is an undeniable sense of everything hanging by a thin thread when traveling around the USA, which I've only experienced in Latin American countries in all my trips.
Giving that I'm originally from Brazil even though with Swedish citizenship, I won't be traveling to the USA anytime in the near future. I have no idea what could happen, might be a completely rare occurrence to be profiled at the border, jailed for no cause, etc., but there's nothing in the USA worth enough to make me even more paranoid at crossing its borders. It's more like the straw that finally broke the camel's back, it's been brewing for a while, I've been stopped by CBP for holding both a B-1/B-2 visa on my Brazilian passport as well as an ESTA on my Swedish one, I do not want the potential issues that another interrogation by CBP at present times could create, like being sent to some jail for 20 days instead of just being refused entry and put on a plane to get back to the EU.
You can claim it's rare, but it happened on 100% of my trips to Sweden. Therefore, I will never travel back to Sweden. It's just not worth it and I have no idea what could happen (stabbing? murder?). Nothing in Sweden is worth the absolute fear this country provokes.
How do you know? It doesn't look like OP specified how much they've traveled.
> I only got robbed twice...in Johannesburg, South Africa and Stockholm, Sweden...it happened on 100% of my trips to Sweden
That sucks, I'm sorry that happened. It sounds like it happened once, and so that "100%" is just one trip by one person? Unfortunately, that result is within the realm of randomness, though I'd understand if, to you, it felt bigger than that.
That said, I don't think it compares to arbitrary (or worse, politically- and personally-motivated) government detainment (or otherwise harming) of innocent people.
It's not rare, it will happen to you. Do not come.
That's actually the nature of bayesian probability: if something is happening a higher proportion of the time vs. before, it's more likely to happen now vs. before. If that something is bad, that means higher risk. It's expected that a rational actor would act to minimize risk to them.
> As someone who spends a lot of time on both locations, I know that both scenarios are rare
Precisely how rare is it, over the last couple months, for US immigration officials to detain someone (perhaps "for further questioning", perhaps to a prison) who hasn't violated any laws? Claiming "it's rare" isn't very useful. Remember, the expected probability is ~0.
The lack of due process and the threat of extradition on a whim is one that feels less likely to happen to me as a caucasian with US citizens as family, but the impact of it would be life-changingly poor. I'd rather just not travel to the US, for tourism, family or business reasons.
I'm not sure anything done in the last 3 months is much of a surprise to people who listened to his campaign talking points. It seems to me that people just thought he was a lying politician who lies, and this was just more lying. What's caught people out is that he's doing it all, and believes SCOTUS will never condemn or find illegal a thing he has done so due process is an abstract concept only, and others consider themselves immune for actions covered by Exec Order.
It's all quite sad and worrying.
Well, so far, that belief seems to be correct.
Detainment is bad enough. It's only a matter of time before extradition to El Salvador is extended, but even if that didn't happen, what is happening right now is enough to put people off.
What about some data, then?
> I don't even think most world population has a tattoo.
Tattoo is a booming business (around 9% growth in 2024). There are stats.
Quoting https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/industry/tattoo-arti...
"A Pew Research Study conducted in 2023 shows that 32.0% of Americans have tattoos. 41.0% of individuals under 30 have at least one tattoo, as do 46.0% of individuals aged between 30 and 49."
That's not "most" in the sense, 50%+. It's still pretty significant.
small thing, but learned at work that often there's a weekly pattern (and I'd bet there is for airplane travel) so you ought use a rolling 7 day average instead of 30 because there are different numbers of weekends in each day's 30 day number.
This is why there's a slight zigzag in the line charts in the article.
[spoiler]
*
*
*
*
*
The dates of Chinese New Year move around across the year and they have such a big effect on the stats that it's easier just to lump the two months together.
[/spoiler]
> Using forward booking data from a major GDS supplier, we've compared the total bookings held at this point last year with those recorded this week for the upcoming summer season. The decline is striking — bookings are down by over 70% in every month through to the end of September. This sharp drop suggests that travellers are holding off on making reservations, likely due to ongoing uncertainty surrounding the broader trade dispute.
* https://www.oag.com/blog/canada-us-airline-capacity-aviation...
* https://thehill.com/business/5218113-us-canada-airline-booki...
I’m American and this administration has set this country back decades. The only way people will rise up here is if their pockets are hurting.
401K accounts are down bad.
Imports of American goods down significantly.
Industries that relied on global trade partners (agriculture?) are getting decimated.
Folks have effectively self owned themselves.
People will only wake up when the economy really hurts. That's why they voted for 47 in the first place, so I hope they're even more awake now.
I make an effort to avoid and me mindful/critical or news/culture war stuff but at the same time.
I’ve got this instinctive vibe that now is not the best time to be visiting the US.
And then add all the other rethoric and actions, which don't make the contemporary U.S. the place it was once idealized to be.
If the "crazy" is gonna happen to you, yeah, that's an entirely different story.
Looking at the crazy New York city, with the crazy architecture and such or going othe replaces and seeing the crazy car centric structures, but also the crazy neighborhood between rich and poor or just the crazy landscape around Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls.
The positive crazy compared to negative crazy sums up less and less to a positive value, though.
But within the metaphor - elected leaders need to balance the short-term approval of voters who are angry/xenophobic, against the longer-term disapproval of voters who don't like losing "their" cuts of withering travel/tourism-related revenues ...and can figure out who is mostly to blame for that.
https://bleedingcool.com/comics/british-comic-creator-r-e-bu...
"While every item in her bag was swabbed and dismantled, she was subjected to a full body search. "I was in this very loud, weird, industrial space with pipes and conveyor belts and lights and sirens, being told to open my legs. I was silently crying, watching all my stuff being torn apart as someone else was searching every crevice of me."
I can't understand how this is allowed to happen.
The simplest explanation is that this administration wants the US to be hated and sees atrocities as an important tool in that effort.
Why would they want that?
It's not like there is a ready drop in replacement for things people desire from the US.
Agreed mere deportation is not an atrocity. But that’s not what’s going on here.
The "kids in cages" Southern border immigration detention ran through both the previous Trump administration and the Biden administration. Some pretty horrific stories from then, especially during COVID.
Then it turns out that she was using Workaway, which is like AirBnB or Uber but for foreign labor on tourist visas. They don't tell you that you need a work visa to work in another country [1], but you almost certainly do anywhere you go, not just the US. The woman in the story was working in exchange for accommodation, which is legal for citizens but not for aliens: work permits and visas exist to deter illegal immigration. She didn't have intent to immigrate illegally, but the scheme under which she entered the country was illegal, and she confessed to it in her statement to the border guards.
The real bad actor in this story was Workaway, and I'm surprised they haven't been shut down yet. They offer an alien labor arrangement that is almost certain to get you detained if caught with the wrong visa, don't give you advice on visas, and aren't there to help if something does go wrong at the border. I doubt there are many countries who welcome their alien labor arrangements, either.
[1] "Workaway is a listing site that enables contact between members, we are unfortunately unable to arrange or advise on visas. There are so many countries with different regulations or laws for different types of volunteering activity, so we would suggest directly getting in touch with the relevant embassy of your destination. It is the responsibility of the host and/or volunteer to make sure they are within the law." https://www.workaway.info/en/stories/workaway-for-newbies-co...
What does NOT usually happen in these cases is 1) having a full body cavity search 2) being shackled in the back of a van 3) having your phone confiscated 4) being forbidden from contacting any family or legal representation 5) having your clothing cut apart 6) being transported to a different city without being informed of what is happening 7) being cut off from access to your foreign funds 8) being detained for 19 days.
The notable thing isn't that she broke the law. The notable thing is the cruel and unusual severity of the punishment for a relatively minor visa violation. Typically, when countries punish tourists so severely for what should be a slap on the wrist, tourists stop wanting to go there.
This was a paperwork issue and should've been resolved with paperwork - refusal of entry and a plane ticket back.
If USAmericans got such a treatment anywhere in the world for similar reasons, it'd be broadcasted as a diplomatic incident in your news channels.
> Brösche had her German passport, confirmation of her visa waiver to enter the country, and a copy of her return ticket back to Berlin
Sounds like all her paper work was good to go...
> she was still pulled aside for a secondary inspection by a US Customs and Border Protection agent.
Ok, that sucks but not too crazy...
> Brösche said she then spent days detained in a cell at the San Diego border before being taken into custody by Ice. The agency brought her to the Otay Mesa detention center, where she’s now been for more than a month.
What?
> US Customs and Border Protection accused Brösche of planning to violate the terms of the visa waiver program by intending to work as a tattoo artist during her time in Los Angeles.
Ok, let's say that's actually the truth. Let's say she told them "yeah I'm gonna work here". Ok, she's in the wrong, worst case but being detained for A MONTH?!
> According to ABC’s 10News, she was forced to spend eight days in solitary confinement in the facility.
?!
> Lofving also said she tried to get help from the German consulate in Los Angeles.
I wish they would have reached out to the Consulate to see if they'd supply any information about what's going on here. Maybe its policy for the consulate to not have any comment about cases though... not sure.
this is less of a defense of ICE than more of a push for transparency so we don't have to deal with low information appeals to emotion.
A sane border would just block illegal entrance. But pretending that ICE should be optimized for single person expedited deportation is just stupid. While in CBP you may not be allowed to contact your lawyer the 60 days she was in ice custody was completely fair game, but she didn't for some unknown reason.
There's no backstory that justifies indefinite detention without due process.
Well, yes, because that's precisely what due process is?
If "everybody" doesn't get a trial before a judge, if _you_ happened to be taken by ICE[1], how would you manage not being deported?
By proving you're a legal citizen? But how do you do so if there's no due process?
[1] (for whatever reason; today it's on the suspicion to be an "illegal", based on whatever the guys smell; but tomorrow?)
This goes for most arrests, probably damn near all of them when it comes to nonviolent crimes.
First, do it for your own safety. A wrong form or the wrong answer to a verbal question after 18 hours of travel could land you in weeks of brutal detention.
Second, do it to help the cause. We here in America need to suffer the consequences of our actions. We need to see conferences canceled. We need to see imports stopped. We need to see people refusing to bring their knowledge and expertise here.
It is going to be a long, dark four years for the globe. It's going to take all of us working from within and without to have any hope of dismantling this evil empire.
With so many fewer people coming the ratio of fliers to immigration people is going to be lower, chance of getting hassled is going to be that much higher.
Personally I'm unlikely to return while these stories of bad things happening to people at the border continue
(this isn't a new thing, in particular because the US has no exit processing infrastructure - people get tagged as overstaying even though they've left, get popped into detention when they return - always keep your boarding passes when you leave).
It's not surprising that people are reluctant to travel to the US now.
"It was useless to close one's eyes or turn one's back to it because it was all around, in every direction, all the way to the horizon. It was not possible for us nor did we want to become islands; the just among us, neither more nor less numerous than in any other human group, felt remorse, shame, and pain for the misdeeds that others and not they had committed, and in which they felt involved, because they sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable. Never again could it be cleansed; it would prove that man, the human species - we, in short - had the potential to construct an infinite enormity of pain, and that pain is the only force created from nothing, without cost and without effort. It is enough not to see, not to listen, not to act."
- Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved
These days, my favorite place to visit is Europe. Even the UK, which can sometimes be tricky for travelers, has never been an issue for me. I’ve only ever had polite and respectful interactions there. And when crossing into Germany in particular, I’ve found the officials to be consistently professional and efficient.
Huh, city centers in Europe are way nicer than anything I've seen in the US. But maybe you're more interested in other things.
The latest month available is still February though.
It might be a better source in a month or two, but not now.
Can someone state the obvious for me please?
The two thoughts in my head were "this is because tourism is down" and "this is because migrants/asylum seekers aren't crossing the border at the moment".
I would think you'd draw different conclusions if it's one or the other, but, regarding the latter, I don't know how many of them cross the border at the border and how many typically do it with a plane ticket.
* The US has repeatedly threatened military invasion of a country (Denmark) near mine.
* The US has basically given Russia the green light to invade the rest of EU when ready.
* Mentioned elsewhere in this thread: The many reports of travellers being detained for weeks.
* The US has recently started an economic war on the entire world, except Russia.
Why would I want to visit?
Another one being accused of selling drugs in LA (never been there, detained for 2 days, banned and put on a flight back home, 5y ago)
Tourism is not down in other countries. Migrants/asylum seekers don't typically fly in by plane to the top 8 airports in the US, and those that do, do not do so in numbers anywhere near large enough to account for the change in numbers.
I thought the problem the US had was people crossing the land border from Mexico?
And such a large number that it dwarfs temporary visitors?
I'm not eager to visit a country where a psycho border agent can decide to detain people for multiple weeks.
Some sent to a super max prison in El Salvador [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/20/deported-bec...
French universities offering to adopt US academics
EU gives you a choice of price & quality - you can pick what fits your budget best. You can have dirt-cheap but also run down/shitty, or you can have expensive (but still nowhere near the UK) and pleasant.
The UK is the worst of both worlds where it's both expensive and shitty.
But of course the received wisdom is that the UK is a third world shithole with more in common with the Democratic Republic of Congo than any European country, so as you were.
> has London
Yes, the place where in prime city centre locations, you see trash bags dumped on the street because there's literally no space for dumpsters, since they'd rather use that space to (quite literally) seek rent. I swear if there was a way to make people pay rent for oxygen, UK would be the first one to implement it.
> the highest wages in Europe
Where half of it will go to taxes (for nothing in return - again, other EU countries' public services are much better value) and the other half on rent and cost of living (the quality of properties is awful, so you really need to go high-end to get something that's merely considered average in many EU countries).
edit: they actually even say that the data "go back for 3 years", but only show 1 year of data.
https://www.axios.com/2025/04/04/foreign-visits-american-air...
- A sight uptick followed, but the number was still down 18.4% as of March 28 versus the same time last year.
- Compare that to the number of U.S. citizens returning to the country, which was up nearly 14% by late March from the year earlier.
Based on a quick online research, I estimate there are about 30-40k visitors landing from Europe in the US on any day. So roughly 3 million people in the last 3 months.
I have seen maybe 5-10 very prominent cases in the last 3 months.
Are these numbers roughly correct?
Do we have any knowledge that this number is higher than before?
Not wanting to support the US for plunging the whole world into economic turmoil or not wanting to support a country speed running into fascism are other reasons.
There are more people killed in mass shootings in the USA every year than there have been people killed in attacks during Christmas in Europe, like, ever.
You may also not take the lottery ticket, and buy someone a drink.
1. Erase your phone before entering the US. Restore it from backup after arrival. CBP has the right to inspect your phone. While you may be able to refuse, likely this means you'll be denied entry and there's nothing you can do about that unless you're lawful permanent resident ("LPR");
2. Don't post on social media under your real name about topics that are likely to get you into trouble. The big ones are anything pro-Palestine or anything critical of Trump;
3. If you are an LPR, do not sign anything they want you to sign if you're detained. What they're trying to do is to get you to voluntarily surrender your LPR status [1]. You have the right to be paroled into the US. Only an immigration judge can forcibly revoke your status;
4. There's stricter enforcement of rules that always existed, particularly abandonment of residency. A green card isn't (and was never intended as) a way to visit the US freely a few weeks a year while living somewhere else;
5. If you are a visa holder you have fewer rights. If you live in the US on a valid visa, I would be extremely hesitant to travel outside the US at all; and
6. Notify friends and family of your travel plans. Additionally, if your country supports it, register your travel with your embassy. The US version of this is STEP [2]. You want someone to make enquiries on your behalf if you are detained and are unable to make outside communications. It's wild that this is where we are.
[1]: https://www.uscis.gov/i-407
[2]: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-tra...
The company I work for has a small branch office in DC, the VP of our US option was out here in just back in December and we were chatting at the Christmas party how I was keen to head over at some point if it would be useful for a project we’re doing for a US customer.
Today I would probably politely decline and just continue meeting remotely if they asked me if I could travel over for a week or two.
Why would anyone fly to a country that's proud of shackling them and keeping them in detention without notifying their families? With the added bonus that next week they might be rendered to a slave gulag in El Salvador?
[0] https://www.eduvast.com/news/spring-break-2024-dates-for-us-...
Charles Lindbergh for example blamed the Jews for WW2
> National polls showed that when England and France declared war on Germany, in 1939, less than 10 percent of our [USA] population favored a similar course for America. ... The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.
Popular opinion was generally against the third reich. In 1936 there was an ultimately unsuccessful effort to boycott the Berlin Olympics and in 1938 94% of Americans disapproved of Germany's antisemitic policies. [0][1]
When the war started, opinion varied depending on the question. When asked about directly entering the war most were indeed against it. However, if asked simply about supporting England, France and Poland, Americans were strongly in favor. They supported providing humanitarian and military aid and rejecting any of Germany's territorial claims. [2] The more complicated question was if America should continue supporting England even if that risked involvement in the war. In early 1940 about 35% were in favor, rising to 70% by Autumn 1941. [3]
[0]: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-moveme...
[1]: https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-holocaust/to...
[2]: https://news.gallup.com/vault/265865/gallup-vault-opinion-st...
Even the Trump brigade are more fascists than nazis. Not that it's a good thing, just pointing out the distinction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_Nazi_rally_at_Madison_Squ...
https://www.smh.com.au/traveller/travel-news/an-australian-w...
I have been to Iraq and Syria so I have been subjected to imprisonment and/or intense questioning almost everytime I enter. I'm pretty familiar with their system and interrogation techniques.
New?! They've been suspicious about these travels for the past 20 years or so.
A good faith interpretation of what they said wouldn't include projecting fear-mongering politics into their meaning.
The monoculture thing came only from you.
I don't think that is valid. While my monoculture question came of as loaded, judging by the backlash of commenters, and I should haven't asked it, I don't think the OP understands the diversity of the US, and I don't think a judgement on value of travel in the US without experiencing it first can be made; even by US residents.
There are other many more layers to a tourist's cost/benefit analysis than just culture. Some of those layers will be common to the entire US:
- exchange rate between USD and their home currency
- affordability might vary across the US, but perhaps the consider even the cheaper places to be too pricey (the US is indeed a very pricey destination compared to much of Europe)
- the customs & border people deter tourists from visiting, no matter where in the US they want to go
- the US is a long flight away for many people in the world, whether they're going to Seattle, LA, NY, or Miami.
OP might be absolutely enthralled by US cultural diversity and still make the exact same comment.
"do you think the US is a monoculture?" implying that the commenter does think that, and that that thought is ignorant and absurd. Instead of asking what they are referring to so you can discuss the point they're making.
What fear mongering politics? The commenter is obviously talking about the reported cases of people being detained, deported, and harassed for their political views.
It is a widely held view of the US by many foreigners; they don't conceptualize how big and diverse the US is.
I thought a perfectly reasonable and likely interpretation of their comment is that the later sentence, with the "also" does not connect their `value of being a tourism in the US` comment to the political climate. Other commenters here apparently do weigh the cost of travel with the risk the government of the country will detain them.
Which now includes a possibility of getting detained while trying to enter.
The border crossing is the first experience that you get from a country. It has definitely gone worse. And it was not great to begin with.
In the past, I had the ... pleasure ... of being put in the "back room" for 3 hours after a long transatlantic flight at SFO. I was not afraid then, just annoyed and tired. I would be afraid now and I would rather avoid it. There's many other places I can choose to visit.
If it were normal police I think you would be right but federal / CBP it is effectively impossible to overcome. One of the big things they do is play jurisdiction fuck-fuck games, if you start to win in federal court the judge will find a reason why it should have been in the state court and vice versa. The other thing they did in say when I lodged a complaint to the nursing board was they just played flip flop games that it was a police search when I complain of illegal health care, but when you complain the police search is illegal it gets shifted to just being health care, so they just flop a catch 22 to avoid being responsible for either.
>Was this all after Trump's ICE enforcement changes?
Was under Biden.
I did not think their comments implied a connection between the value of being a tourist in the US and a their concerns over politics. Maybe if it were much cheaper they wouldn't care about the politics, but that doesn't seem likely to me.
It is followed with "But yes, there is also the political climate.", which I interpreted as an agreement with the reasons in the article -- that the decline was due to the political climate.
How is that a misinterpretation? It seems likely and reasonable that that the "ridiculously overpriced" comment is being stated because they meant it is _additional_ reason for the decline - as it is one not stated in the article.
To take this a step further, it doesn't matter where you enter the country, even if it is a place where the people are generally nice and specifically sympathetic to tourists getting detained, the first person you're dealing with is an LEO at border control & they are all following the same orders. They appear to be going out of their way to look for reasons (on your cell phone, tattoos, etc.) to send you back home. God forbid you have a run in with another cop after you've entered the country...
Is the reporting and media coverage on this, going to contribute to the potential harm of this being a long term impact? (is the hype creating the conditions?)
Is the media coverage supposed to entertain the powers that be, or to report things as they are?
Who's there?
Me, can I come in?
I don't know, come in and we'll find out.
...ok
WHAT THE HELL WHY DID YOU COME IN YOU'RE NOT WELCOME HERE
...sorry but you said-
I DON'T CARE WHAT I SAID.
...OK fine I'll just be leaving.
OH YOU THINK YOU CAN JUST LEAVE? YOU CANT LEAVE! You'll be locked in my dank basement for the next five days while I fill out the paperwork for you to be dragged out of the house!
But I just said I'm willing to leave voluntarily!
They can deny you entry, but you're not going to be locked up in some sex dungeon for a week in Toronto
Or has that already been privatised?
There are still Federal standards they have to comply with but it’s more reasonable than the US (we never had to take off our shoes and liquids of any size have been allowed again for years as long as you’re only going to the domestic part of the airport, they’re separated here)
And now we can see the problem that this can create you huge problems just by posting lawful content that is not positive to Trump and his policies...
For European visitors, they can see the fascism miles away. A lot of Europe was occupied by Hitler while the US wasn't. The extraordinary claim that Musk's salute wasn't a Nazi salute is mind boggling. Even when people have seen it side by side: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1Zwiv8erk0
News of tourists getting imprisoned for weeks or longer have been all over the news, but so far Europe doesn't seem to have actually brought out a general warning for that kind of danger.
That said, the people I've spoken to (most of which aren't LGBT+) are hesitant to go to the US now. There's a stark difference between the "haha, what the fuck, US" sentiment I used to sense and the "what the fuck, US" we're getting now.
Agreed, and this is a nice way of putting it. There's a sense that shit is really hitting the fan this time.
The travel warnings for Germany in the 1930s were specific groups targeted by the Nazi government, such as Jewish people
Unlike what the right-wing media may make it seem, the amount of trans/nonbinary people is absolutely minute. The warnings apply to at most a percentage of the population, and even then it only affects the people that have come out of the closet and jumped through the hoops necessary to get their passport altered.
That obviously doesn't make the political trend _right_, but the geopolitical and economic implications are very different.
These warnings don't include advice against entering the country as a tourist, despite the recent reports of tourists getting arrested and locked away at the border. Such a warning would set a much more grim tone for the future of the western bloc.
https://www.newsweek.com/portugal-issues-travel-warning-us-2...
Last I checked, Germany's advice was similar (i.e., not a general warning); and from the article, it doesn't look like Portugal's advice is a Travel Warning either. There's a difference between making information available, and providing warnings.
What changed is that they made the text clearer, that ESTA approval doesn't guarantee entry and decision is made by the border officer and adding a note that wrong information may lead to incarceration.
Those notes weren't "needed" before as that was rare, while theoretically the rules were the same, but seem to be handled stricter now.
This is still far from a "proper" travel warning.
https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/de/service/laender/usa-node/...
It's absolute lunacy that western governments are giving out negative travel advice against the US at all, but I've noticed Newsweek seems to have an agenda on this topic.
We've had multiple examples in the last few weeks of Australians being detained and having phones/laptops searched for no legitimate reason e.g.
https://www.smh.com.au/traveller/travel-news/an-australian-w...
For example, Australia issued a new update "warning" people that they maybe inadmissible for any reason.
https://www.smartraveller.gov.au/destinations/americas/unite...
Current affairs
When traveling to the United States, it is important to note that a valid ESTA or visa does not necessarily entitle you to enter the United States. Overstaying your stay or providing incorrect information about the purpose of your stay may result in arrest or deportation.
The United States has also issued an executive order (25 STATE 11402) on February 24, 2025, according to which applicants for a US ESTA or visa must in future indicate their gender as either “male” or “female”. According to the order, applicants must indicate their gender as determined at birth in their application.
If the applicant’s current gender as recorded in their passport differs from their gender as determined at birth, the US authorities may refuse entry. It is recommended to check the entry requirements in advance with the US authorities.
There is no gender marking X in the Finnish passport. If, for example, a dual citizen has a passport with an X marking, the entry requirements can be checked in advance with the US authorities.
Political demonstrations may occur in major cities, which may turn violent. Avoid large gatherings or demonstrations.
Edit: source https://um.fi/matkustustiedote/-/c/US
Can you post the plain text of these "travel warnings"?
In it you’ll find several direct links to the official warnings
Oh my god it's like Nazi Germany!
Germany also added a warning that minor criminal history can be a reason for imprisonment and deportation, as well as a reminder that an American visa or ESTA document are meaningless against an unwilling border patrol agent:
Weder eine gültige ESTA-Genehmigung noch ein gültiges US-Visum begründen einen Anspruch auf Einreise in die USA. Die endgültige Entscheidung über die Einreise trifft der US-Grenzbeamte. Es empfiehlt sich, Nachweise über die Rückreise (z.B. Flugbuchung) bei der Einreise mitzuführen. Gegen dessen Entscheidung gibt es keinen Rechtsbehelf. Den deutschen Auslandsvertretungen ist es nicht möglich, auf die Rückgängigmachung einer Einreiseverweigerung hinzuwirken.
Reisende sollten ausschließlich mit einem gültigen ESTA oder Visum in die USA reisen, das dem geplanten Aufenthaltszweck entspricht. Vorstrafen in den USA, falsche Angaben zum Aufenthaltszweck oder eine auch nur geringfügige Überschreitung der Aufenthaltsdauer bei Reisen können bei Ein- bzw. Ausreise zu Festnahme, Abschiebehaft und Abschiebung führen.
Når du skal søge om ESTA eller visum til USA, er der to kønsbetegnelser at vælge imellem: mand eller kvinde. Hvis du har kønsbetegnelsen X i dit pas, eller du har skiftet køn, anbefales det at kontakte den amerikanske ambassade forud for rejsen for vejledning om, hvordan du skal forholde dig.
Die ESTA-Beantragung ist gebührenpflichtig (21 USD).
Reisende in die USA müssen bei ESTA- oder Visumanträgen entweder das Geschlecht „männlich“ oder „weiblich“ angeben; relevant ist hierbei der Geschlechtseintrag der antragstellenden Person zum Zeitpunkt der Geburt. Reisende, die den Geschlechtseintrag „X“ innehaben oder deren aktueller Geschlechtseintrag von ihrem Geschlechtseintrag bei Geburt abweicht, sollten vor Einreise die zuständige Auslandsvertretung der USA in Deutschland kontaktieren und die geltenden Einreisevoraussetzungen in Erfahrung zu bringen.
Yhdysvallat on myös antanut 24.2.2025 toimeenpanomääräyksen (25 STATE 11402), jonka mukaan Yhdysvaltojen ESTA:a tai viisumia hakevan on jatkossa ilmoitettava sukupuolekseen joko ”mies” tai ”nainen”. Määräyksen mukaan hakijan on hakemuksessa ilmoitettava syntymähetkellä vahvistettu sukupuolensa.
Jos hakijan nykyinen passiin merkitty sukupuoli poikkeaa hänen syntymässä vahvistetusta sukupuolestaan, Yhdysvaltojen viranomaiset voivat evätä luvan maahantuloon. Maahantulon edellytykset on suositeltavaa varmistaa etukäteen Yhdysvaltain viranomaisilta.
Suomen passissa ei ole sukupuolimerkintää X. Jos esim. kaksoiskansalaisella on passi, jossa X-merkintä on, voi maahantulon edellytykset tarkistaa etukäteen Yhdysvaltain viranomaisilta.Trump has ruined basically all our credibility on a global scale.
Trump seems to be going nuclear with this plan, and because he obviously is not particularly smart or diplomatic, I don't think he grasps the immense second and third order effects this will have on perceptions of America. American goods might get cheaper, but maybe no one will want to buy them. No one will want to travel to the US. No one will want to live in the US.
So dumb.
So for Canadians still travelling to the U.S. it might actually increase their carbon footprint.
The US is made up of 350 million people. Only one of them is Donald Trump. Most of the country didn’t vote for him. We still value our friends and allies, even if the stooge Putin got elected does not.
We're fully aware that the guy who put tariffs because he got angry at us on a whim is the same guy who can launch the nukes.
The fact that that happened shows something is deeply wrong in the US.
The US government, (mostly) democratically elected, has decided to harm the rest of the world.
Even if there are good people in the US, they can't seem to win. So one could argue, what use are the good people in the US, for everyone else?
So the reaction is kind of expected and natural.
I'll allow it.
But that doesn't change the fact that there are good people in the US.
But good and bad are a bit irrelevant. I believe it was a mistake to go poking Europe with a stick because there are 600 million people there. Most far better educated than us. They were perfectly contented to sleep in the then current global order, and willing to help with maintaining that order if called on in an emergency.
For some incomprehensible reason, we decide to go over there and poke that lion?
I don't get it because I genuinely believe that Europe would be the best partner for the US. It's not because I'm "good" or "bad", but because I believe close relations with Europe are good for this republic. Now obviously, in the US at the moment, mine is not the consensus view. That's fine. But I believe it's gonna cost us.
China and the EU will become closer. All of Asia will begin to realize there is more to be gained by working together than working at odds with each other.
And heaven help the rest of the world if the Europeans, the Chinese, and the Africans ever figure out that if they work together they don't really need the rest of us.
That's the part I just don't understand, they think after the willful crash of the US economy the rest of the world will bail us out because...
It makes a lot more sense to invest the "seven trillion dollars" or whatever number they're throwing around in their own economies rather than build up the manufacturing base of someone else. Spanish factories in Spain versus Spanish factories in the US.
Then, assuming these companies do invest all this money in the US, they will just complain how the foreigners are buying up all the "strategic assets" and are a "clear and present danger" to American Sovereignty. America is not for sale, don't ya know?
That doesn't matter when the bad people are running the border crossing and could ruin your life on a whim.
It doesn't matter if you didn't vote for this guy. You collectively didn't do enough to stop him from getting reelected and now you're not doing enough to stop him from hurting former allies.
Fix your domestic problems and then we can look towards starting up a dialogue of reconciliation.
Most of the country couldn't vote at all because they are immigrants (not citizens) or because of any of the structural reasons why they couldn't take time off to vote or they were intimated at the ballot box. Voting day still isn't a federal holiday.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/elections/2024
Trump/Vance got 49.1% of the popular vote, and Kamala/Walz got 48.3% of the popular vote. None of those clowns even cracked 50%.
The candidates were so bad, that you could win without getting a majority of the popular vote.
So, yeah, just a wholesale failure by both sides to inspire the vast majority of Americans. I guess right now, we're kind of seeing why no one was enthused about these guys being in power.
If anything I feel sympathy for the American people now that I and many others feel strongly compelled to avoid US services and products, and avoid travelling and spending my tourist and business dollars into your economy based on the actions of Trump and the Republicans!
I mean if I was just put on a flight back (for a tweet they found on my phone or such), that'd be kind of bearable. At least one visitor from the UK got locked up in a facility for a week.
If you're talking about Rebecca Burke, it was almost three weeks. All for something that was at worst a naive understanding of the visa she needed.
https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/rebecca...
No one wants to be detained.
People who are spending thousands and tens of thousands of dollars to travel are fine if they need to spend a few hundreds additional ro fly back and cancel their vacation. Or sucks but it’s in the realm of the risks you take with international travel.
However, being detained, even for 1 day, and treated like a criminal is something none of these folks want.
https://www.sportskeeda.com/mma/news-update-u-s-federal-pris...
"UPDATE: I just spoke with coach Renato Subotic for a few minutes. He says he was detained at FDC Honolulu, which is a federal prison facility. He says he has no criminal record and it was a simple visa application issue. Interview later this week."
Not gonna happen this year, probably the next 3 years or more.
Because it worked so well in the last years. /s
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43610246
Fewer Foreign Passengers Are Flying to the US (jasher.substack.com)
212+ points, 128+ comments (posted slightly earlier)
Arguably @dang or @tomhow might ultimately combine them, but for anyone curious you'll find better (or at least a lot more) discussion on the other article.
I have travelled for conferences in the US several times, now I'd be worried they'd argue you need a B-1 visa instead of ESTA waiver if you visit the company office after the conference, etc.
And detain you for weeks when you don't have it.
The USA is supposed to be the land of the free.