The cohosts of The View reacted to Donald Trump‘s newest plan to require travelers from 42 countries to submit their social media feeds for review in order to travel to the United States, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Australia, among other visa-waiver program nations. Alyssa Farah Griffin was particularly concerned by the move and brought out the proverbial receipts to express why.
“Is this going to kill tourism in this country?” Joy Behar asked her cohosts. “I mean, it’s down six-point-something ercent, which translates to $12 billion, approximately, in lost revenue.”
“It’s actually significantly more,” Griffin then said. “It’s actually about $250 billion in lost revenue to the United States because of the dip in tourism we saw in 2025, which has been by experts, largely attributed to the political environment in the United States, the tariffs kind of driving up cost of goods that you’re going to buy once you’re here, and then the president’s also put some other visa restrictions in place that are already making it more expensive to come here.”
Griffin went on to add, “One of the biggest revenue generators to the United States is foreign tourism. People want to come here. They want to spend their money here. It creates jobs.”
She then said Trump “dodged” the issue of the economic impact of lost tourism in the clip the group reviewed of him speaking about it, adding, “He was asked pretty much point-blank, ‘What is this going to do to the tourism industry?’ And he didn’t have a good answer.” She also suggested that Trump, of all people, should care about that issue, having run multiple hotels across the country and the globe himself.
“Listen, every one of us, I’m sure, cares about making sure people who want to do harm don’t come into this country. That’s not really what this is about,” Griffin continued. “We’re actually very good at catching people who have threatened the U.S., who have espoused any kind of beliefs that are hateful, long before they come to the United States in the post-9/11 era. That’s something we do very effectively. This is much more about looking at people’s social media. I think it’s weeding out ideological [issues].”
Ana Navarro then joked that if her own social media were scrutinized that way, she’d be “banned from entering this country for life,” adding that she knows from experience because she is not allowed to return to her birth nation of Nicaragua for being critical of its government. “I was shocked because it’s actually mostly white countries. Usually, when he’s banning people from this country, it’s Black and brown people he’s banning. But this is Australia, and it’s Belgium, and it’s the Netherlands. It’s 42 countries.”
“If the purpose of looking at the social media is to weed out people who are writing ‘Death to America’ or maybe associating with terrorist groups who, there’s clear red flags that they may pose a threat to America, I say good,” Navarro continued. “If the scrutinizing of the social media is about criticism of Trump and eliminating people who may criticize Trump, that is what dictators do in places like Nicaragua, like Venezuela, like Cuba, like North Korea. They have every right to disagree with Trump, to criticize them in the same way that we do in this country. So therein lies the difference. Is it about intimidating people, silencing people into not criticizing people?”
Sara Haines vehemently agreed with Navarro, saying, “You literally took the words out of my mouth.” She noted that if the purpose of the act was to weed out people associated with terrorism, that would be fine. However, she added, “If it becomes someone criticizes Trump, or maybe has a policy difference with Trump, that’s not terrorist, just maybe progressive or something different, it could very quickly turn into complete censorship of anyone coming to this country.”
Sunny Hostin said this was a matter of free speech to criticize the U.S. government on social media and said, “That doesn’t make you a terrorist because you may not agree with governmental policy. And as far as Trump is concerned, he doesn’t seem to mind that white Afrikaners are coming here who subscribe to apartheid and are anti-Black. He doesn’t seem to have a problem with that type of terrorism. But what I will say this is I’m concerned with the fact that the administration is demanding that prospective foreign students unlock their social media profiles, and those who refuse to do so will be they’re suspected of hiding their activity, and there are just several high-profile foreign students have been detained for voicing support for, let’s say, Palestinian or arguing against genocide, arguing against war crime. That is an ideological thing. And I that’s that’s not necessarily anti-American. And so I’m, I’m really bothered, I think, by the fact that the administration may be trying to silence people… This is supposed to be the land of free speech.”
Griffin then circled back to finish her point, saying, “I cannot express enough how big of an economic devastation this will be to the U.S. tourism industry. You’re talking about the U.K., some of our closest allies in this U.S. visa waiver program, who are coming in many times, multiple times, throughout the year, and they’re already seeing backlogs at some of these embassies that they’re saying, ‘Your appointment to get a visa is going to be delayed weeks and weeks.’ People are going to cancel trips. They’re not going to come.”
“Where’s the Supreme Court?” Behar wondered aloud.
“This is why we saw last week, the president of FIFA giving him that fake medal,” Navarro then said. “Because when you look at the list of these countries, many, many of these countries are actually playing in the World Cup, and the people from these countries are going to want to attend these games, and so it behooves the president of FIFA to make sure that the people paying thousands of dollars to buy tickets and come to this country that are going to spend it in our American cities are able to get the visas. So he needs to give him another medal.”
The View, weekdays, 11a/10c, ABC
