The Unintended Repelling Consequences of Migration Policy Change: Why a Targeted Travel Ban Mostly Reduced Visitors from Non-Targeted Countries

Scholars of migration have assessed the domestic audience costs of governments' implementation of controversial migration policies; however, they assess less frequently the unintended indirect costs to their constituents due to how such policies change the opinion of foreign audiences and their intentions to travel and migrate into the country. Based on a quantitative analysis of over 220 million observations of foreigners entering the US that after the 2016 election, the 2017 travel ban, and the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the ban, I find that after each event, fewer foreign nationals entered the US from continents not targeted by the ban than from countries targeted by the ban. This was especially true for foreign nationalities that generate the most tourist revenue. I also offer textual evidence from social media posts by potential travelers to the US that they decided to cancel plans to visit the US because they found Trump’s restrictive campaign promise and later policy to ban specific foreign nationalities morally offensive, or because they felt a sense of linked fate with the targeted nationalities and therefore vulnerable. This study contributes to research on how migration policies of governments can have unintended consequences and chilling effects for international migrant and traveler flows, largely due to how prospective visitors and migrants of distinct societies respond in heterogeneous ways to such a controversial policy at different stages of its realization, from a campaign promise to a law upheld by the courts.