Semafor’s U.S. Tourism Graph Crime

Semafor published a graph earlier this week purportedly showing a staggering decline in tourism to the United States from five countries. Among them, it appeared to illustrate a decline from over twenty million Canadian visitors a few years ago to under eight million this year. That felt fishy to me as I had also recently read a Statistics Canada bulletin claiming Canadian travel to the U.S. in June rose by 5% year-over-year, marking the “third consecutive month of growth”. How do we reconcile this with Semafor’s graph?

Kieran Healy:

These numbers come from International Trade Administration’s I-94 arrivals data. They maintain a spreadsheet that counts all international visitors by country of residence who arrive in the U.S., spend at least one night here, are among qualified visa holders, including tourist visas and waivers and so forth. This is a monthly series. Right now, we only have data up to August of 2026, and for a couple of countries in the graph only up till June. I think — I am only guessing — that what the person who made this graph did was aggregate to yearly totals, plot those points, and then smooth them. (That’s why the y-axis values are so large in comparison to the ones on the monthly graphs I’m about to show you.) But the data for 2026 are only for half the year, hence the giant drop.

Graphs are supposed to be illuminating, helping to illustrate concepts that are difficult to conceptualize with numbers or words alone. What Semafor produced is the opposite of that: it is horribly misleading, and should be retracted.