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A comment on New DHS policy on demands for passwords to travelers’ electronic devices. Parent comment

Re:New DHS policy on demands for passwords to travelers’ ele... by kylec on Friday January 12, 2018 @03:56AM (#16131460)
To be honest, I doubt the amount of money brought into the US by foreign tourists amounts to much in the big scheme of things. I respect your principled stand against the threats against your security and privacy by the US Government, but it won’t really make anyone here poorer.
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Re:New DHS policy on demands for passwords to travelers’ ele... by stedaniels on Friday January 12, 2018 @04:18AM (#16131551)
World Travel & Tourism Council Travel & Tourism Economic Impact 2017 United States

"Visitor exports generated USD 212.3bn, 9.5% of total exports in 2016. This is forecast to fall by 0.6% in 2017, and grow by 3.9% pa, from 2017-2027, to USD 309.7bn in 2027, 9.3% of total." [0]

US GDP in 2016 was USD 18624bn. [1]

So I suppose it's only 1.1% of GDP.

What's USD 212.3bn between frenemies huh? ;-)

[0] https://www.wttc.org/-/media/files/reports/economic-impact-r...

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location...

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Re:New DHS policy on demands for passwords to travelers’ ele... by kylec on Friday January 12, 2018 @04:23AM (#16131574)
Exactly. The complete loss of international tourism (and realistically there wouldn’t ever be a complete loss unless we closed the border) would result in a 1% loss for the US GDP/economy. Not nothing, but certainly not devastating.
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Re:New DHS policy on demands for passwords to travelers’ ele... by piva00 on Friday January 12, 2018 @05:08AM (#16131754)
You do understand there's also a downward spiral for tourism, right?

Tourism generated 1% of the GDP but you don't know the impact on other industries, you haven't seen figures on lost of tax revenue from jobs lost, cost of retraining people to find new jobs, burden on society from unemployment, etc.

I don't think that tourism will cease in the US but any downturn on it has larger effects than just the GDP figure brought by the industry itself.

Of course, if you only care about numbers the dollar figure won't look much, if you care about the lives affected by idiotic policies then you have to look deeper.

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Re:New DHS policy on demands for passwords to travelers’ ele... by CaptainZapp on Friday January 12, 2018 @09:13AM (#16132898)
I never understood why US airports never implemented the transit concept.

Theoretically it could be extremely convenient to use the US as a transit point if your final destination is, for example, a country in Latin America.

But when you connect via any US airport you need to deal with imigration, pick up your luggage, deal with customs hassle, re-check your luggage and proceed through the entire TSA song and dance.

Depending on the airport not even 3 hours may be sufficient to make the connection and the hassle you experience is just not worth it.

For comparison: Some European airports have legal connection times of 30 minutes (Vienna). Longer than 90 minutes is almost unheard of.

Just about any international airport gets that concept, even in massively underdeveloped countries. The US just doesn't seem to get it.

It must cost US carriers dozen -, if not hundreds of millions in yearly lost revenues.

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Re:New DHS policy on demands for passwords to travelers’ ele... by gergles on Friday January 12, 2018 @12:21PM (#16134487)
Because statistically nobody transits through the US. Almost everyone ending up in the US is staying. A lengthy flight across the Atlantic/Pacific to then take another lengthy flight across the other ocean is just not something many people do.
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Re:New DHS policy on demands for passwords to travelers’ ele... by jimnotgym on Saturday January 13, 2018 @09:26AM (#16139717)
OK, but what if I stopped buying US goods and US services? What if I pulled my investments from US equities? What if I added a tariff on services provided by US companies, because they had benefited from an un-competitively low corporation tax rate?

The US is not the first empire. You might want to read up on how the others failed.

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Re:New DHS policy on demands for passwords to travelers’ ele... by arethuza on Friday January 12, 2018 @04:13AM (#16131525)
"expenditures by international visitors in the United States totaled $244.7 billion in 2016"

https://www.selectusa.gov/travel-tourism-and-hospitality-ind...

About 1.3% of US GDP - which is maybe not significant to the US economy as a whole but I suspect that spending is very localized in locations that probably would suffer if foreign tourists reduced in numbers.

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Re:New DHS policy on demands for passwords to travelers’ ele... by speeq on Friday January 12, 2018 @05:01AM (#16131724)
The US economy is really massive, $244.7 billion is more than the GDP of Finland.
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Re:New DHS policy on demands for passwords to travelers’ ele... by robin_reala on Friday January 12, 2018 @04:06AM (#16131502)
According to the World Bank[1] the US took in $246b in 2015 from international tourism.

[1]: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ST.INT.RCPT.CD?location...

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