Nigeria had the biggest drop in visitors to the US last year as a result of US President Donald Trump’s visa policies takes effect .
According to reports by Quartz, – “Data from the US travel and tourism office shows Nigeria recorded the largest global drop-off in visitors to the US. As of October 2019, 34,000 fewer Nigerians traveled to the US compared to the previous year—a 21% drop. After a sustained period of growth between 2011 and 2015, the number of Nigerian visitors to the US started to plateau in 2016 until the big drop-off last year”.
It says “The second largest drop was for visitors from Venezuela (17.7%). The South American country is in the midst of an economic and political crisis which has seen more than four million people flee the country and the US is restricting entry to Venezuelan migrants”.
According to the report, “The dip in Nigerian visitors to the US followed a string of visa clampdown measures by the Trump administration targeting Africa’s largest economy.”
President Donald Trump’s order to crack down on visa overstays targets mostly African and Asian nations.
And the efforts aimed at dealing with only about 12% of foreigners who legally enter the U.S. on short-term visas but remain in the country after that visa has expired.
Trump had in April 2019, ordered the secretaries of State and Homeland Security to develop plans to crack down on countries whose citizens are most likely to overstay their visas, a long-term problem that is now the biggest driver of illegal immigration into the United States. In 2018, more than 569,000 foreigners overstayed their visas, according to Homeland Security data.
In an effort to slow that trend, Trump ordered Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan to implement a broad series of punishments for countries whose citizens overstay their tourist and business visas more than 10% of the time.
Those punishments includes limiting the number of people who can travel to the U.S. from any one country, requiring foreign travelers to post “admission bonds” that would be repaid once they leave the country and requesting more documents from foreigners seeking visas.
The region facing the most potential impact of that policy is Africa, home to 13 countries on the list ranging from Angola to Chad to Sudan. The biggest target by far is Nigeria, which saw 29,004 of its citizens overstay their visas in 2018.
Another six countries on the list are located in Asia, and several have been embroiled in bloody armed conflicts, such as Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen.
Rounding out the list are the island nations of Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia, who combined for 13 total visa overstays in 2018.
