This is an adapted excerpt from the April 16 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”

For the first time in four decades, the Olympics are returning to Los Angeles. On Wednesday, we got a look at where many of the venues for the 2028 Summer Games will be, from Long Beach to Pasadena to Dodger Stadium, even the Universal Studios lot. 

It’s a huge deal because when one of the world’s biggest sports events comes to your country, you get a lot of tourists, a ton of revenue and the global prestige that comes with hosting the Games. Last year’s Olympics drew an estimated 11.2 million visitors to greater Paris and, of course, many more viewers watching and saying to themselves, “We should visit Paris sometime.”

Under normal circumstances, Los Angeles could expect to see similar benefits. But the current circumstances aren’t exactly normal, are they?

Donald Trump’s entire shtick as president is that America is being ripped off by foreigners. The U.S. is kicking people out, not letting them in. His administration has canceled the visas of hundreds of foreign students in U.S. colleges. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is basically telling the world that if you think the wrong way, we don’t really need you in the U.S.: “Visiting America is not an entitlement,” Rubio wrote in an opinion piece for Fox News. “It is a privilege extended to those who respect our laws and values.”

It’s a policy born out of the general MAGA worldview that says foreigners are taking from our society without contributing. But here’s the thing to remember, since we are also in a trade war. The United States has always run a huge trade surplus with the rest of the world in one particular industry: tourism to America.

People have always wanted to visit the United States. They come from all over the world and they visit our institutions, our shops and our museums. They eat in our restaurants and stay in our hotels. The U.S. travel industry says it generated $1.3 trillion last year and supported 15 million American jobs.

That’s not just from foreign families on holiday; it also came from an education system that was the envy of the world until a couple of months ago. The world sends its budding scientists and engineers and doctors to America for higher studies, and American schools take their tuition dollars.

We also get the benefit of really smart people coming to our country, where they do research here in America that helps American enterprise. Even MAGA people grasp that concept when the foreigner in question is a certain South African immigrant who made his way to study at the University of Pennsylvania before becoming the world’s richest person.

That’s a common story, and now the U.S. is basically trying to chase all these people out with ludicrous mass visa cancellations, which seemed to start as an ideological crusade against individuals who held different views than the administration on the war in Gaza. Now, they’re on this incomprehensibly capricious spree in which they appear to be making up infractions.

Like in the case of Suguru Onda, a Japanese graduate student in computer science at Brigham Young University, who is married with five children, two of whom were born here in the U.S. Earlier this month, the government told Onda his visa has been revoked because they found a criminal record for him. But Onda reportedly only has two speeding tickets on his record and a catch-and-release violation from a fishing trip in 2019, which was later dismissed by a court. Nevertheless, he and his family may be forced out of the country before the end of the month. Again, for two speeding tickets and a fishing violation.

Of course, the Trump persecution extends beyond college students. Border officials in Houston detained and deported an Australian man who had more than a year left on his work visa. The man, who spoke to The Guardian on the condition his real name was not disclosed, said he had been trying to get back to the U.S. after attending an overseas memorial for his sister. The man alleges U.S. officials called him an epithet and told him, “Trump is back in town; we’re doing things the way we should have always been doing them.”

When asked about the Australian man’s allegations, a Department of Homeland Security media representative told The Guardian that, because the outlet had withheld any identifiable details and the department did not have the individual’s full name, they could not answer questions on “something we cannot verify the veracity of.”

“Just like I cannot confirm the existence of Bigfoot,” the representative added.

The effect of all this on U.S. tourism is exactly what you’d expect it to be. According to data from the International Trade Administration and the Commerce Department, travel from Europe to America has already cratered under Trump. 

It’s happening elsewhere, too. New data this week — also from the International Trade Administration — shows that in March, arrivals of noncitizens to the U.S. by plane dropped almost 10% from a year earlier. OAG Aviation Worldwide, a flight database, found that Canadian flight reservations to the U.S. are down 70% through September versus the same period last year. That’s Canada, which accounts for more than a quarter of tourism to the U.S.

In a new worst-case estimate, Goldman Sachs says reduced travel and boycotts could cost the U.S. almost $90 billion in lost GDP this year alone. Again, that’s money that flows from foreigners to Americans that Trump, in his infinite wisdom, may choke off.

Trump can bray all he wants about sticking it to those no-good foreigners but, in the same way that it’s Americans who will foot the bill for his tariffs, when it comes to his war on tourism, it’s Americans who will pay the price.