International Visitors to Chicago
Patrick Callahan
Department of Political Science
DePaul University
Introduction
I decided on this topic because it is closely related to a course I teach named
“International Chicago.” This course is part of the
First-Year Program. In it, the class examines the
extent to which and the ways that Chicago is
The first part of the report provides
background on the topic. It explains why
this topic was chosen and what
knowledge the author already has.
connected to the world outside the United States. There are three basic categories of
connections:
1. Movement of goods and services between Chicago and other countries, that is,
economic connections.
2. Movement of symbols between Chicago and other countries, that is, cultural
connections.
3. Movement of people between Chicago and other countries, that is, demographic
connections.
The three categories overlap. When businesses transact commerce, business people often
travel. When people move permanently to Chicago, they bring with them artifacts of their
culture. Nevertheless, for purposes of basic simplification, we can treat the categories
separately.
This research project concerns the movement of people between Chicago and other
countries. Movement of people can be more or less permanent, in which case we are
talking about immigration, or it can be more or less temporary, in which case we are talking
about travel. Travel can be for business or professional purposes or it can be for pleasure,
also called tourism.
The government of the City of Chicago has sought to promote foreign visitors.
Foreign visitors bring money and spend money, which improves the economy of the city: it
creates profits for businesses, jobs for workers, and tax revenue for the city government.
Business and professional travelers are drawn by convention business and McCormick
Place was built by the city to be one of the world’s largest sites for conventions. During the
administration of Mayor Richard M. Daley, the city also has worked to make the downtown
area attractive to other visitors. Examples are the flowers that are planted along State
Street and the Riverwalk and especially Michigan Avenue north of the river. Public art has
been encouraged as a lure for drawing visitors. The city has many items of public art by
famous artists, such as the mosaic by Joan Miro in the Chase Plaza, the Calder statue in the
post office plaza, and the most famous, the Picasso in the plaza of the Daley Center. The
city also has sponsored more popular forms of public art, such as the decorated cow statues
several years ago. The most spectacular and successful draw for tourism is Millenium Park.
DATA
In this report, I will present data on the
movement of people in and out of the city from
international locations. All of my data are derived
from the 2010 edition Statistical Abstract of the
United States available on the Quantitative
Reasoning Center’s website
This second section of the report tells
about the data that will be used. It
identifies the source and it discusses the
reasons why the author has confidence in
them. Not all reports will have a single
section explaining the source and validity
of the data. If different parts of the
analysis use data from different sources,
each of the data sources would be
introduced and evaluated when it is first
used.
[http://qrc.depaul.edu/]. The data are compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau from official
sources. I work on the assumption that they are reasonably accurate. The Census Bureau
itself has no reason to misrepresent the true information and indeed has a strong vested
interest in presenting accurate information. Similarly, the official sources from which it
draws have no clear reason to distort the information. Any distortion, therefore, is likely to
be relatively minor and unsystematic and thus not a threat to the accuracy of the statistical
results and conclusions presented in this report.
RESULTS
In 2008, Chicago hosted roughly 1.4 million foreign visitors.1 This placed it in ninth
place among U.S. cities. The number of foreign visitors of the top ten cities is presented in
Figure 1.
1
2010 Statistical Abstract of the United States, Table 1224. Top States and Cities Visited by Overseas Travelers.
The data are extracted and presented as Appendix 1.
The chart appears to show that U.S. cities fall into three classes. At the very top and
in a class by itself is New York City with over 8 million visitors. The second class, consisting
of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Orlando, and Las
Vegas, had between 2.0 and 2.8 million visitors with an
average of 2.5 million. Chicago is in the third class, along
The average for each class and the
percentage changes (below) were
computed, employing skills taught
and learned in LSP 120.
with Honolulu, Washington, D.C, and Boston, whose visitors range between one and two
million and average 1.4 million. It would be hard to overestimate the significance of the
difference between New York and the other cities. Its number of visitors was 230% greater
than the average for the second class and 503% greater than the average for the third
class.
One might ask what accounts for the
differences among cities in the number of foreign
visitors they attract. One possible explanation is the
Here I move from a reading of the
statistical results (that is, stating in words
their basic pattern or salient
characteristics) to an interpretation of
them, that is, commentary on their
significance.
size of the city itself. To examine this, I created a
scatter diagram of the city’s number of visitors and the population of its metropolitan area.
The results show no apparent pattern once one ignores the point representing New York.2 In
order to take a deeper look at the relationship between
population and attraction of foreign visitors I computed the
Computation of rates and ranking
of cases on a variable are skills
taught and learned in LSP 120.
number of foreign visitors per capita for each city and its
metropolitan district. The ranking of the ten cities is presented in Table 1 (next page).
2
In order to save space, the scatter diagram is not reproduced in this report.
The results clearly show that three cities –
Honolulu, Orlando, and Las Vegas – are unusually
popular destination for foreign travelers. Orlando and
Las Vegas are cities created for the tourism industry.
Honolulu’s ranking at the top is somewhat surprising.
Perhaps what accounts for it is its relative proximity
to Asia which makes it more convenient for Asian
tourists than are other major American cities.
Table 1: Foreign visitors per
capita for top ten U.S. cities,
2008
City
Visitors
Honolulu
1.7
Orlando
1.2
Las Vegas
1.1
San Francisco
0.6
Miami
0.5
New York
0.4
Washington, D. C.
0.3
Boston
0.2
Los Angeles
0.2
Chicago
0.1
Chicago ranks at the bottom of the ranking of cities
on per capita foreign visitors, its rate of visitors being half that of the two just above it
(Boston and Los Angeles), one-third that of Washington, D.C., one-fourth that of New York,
one-fifth of that of Miami, and one-sixth that of San Francisco. The reasons for Chicago’s
relatively poor performance are not known but most likely would include its being the only
city on the list that is located in the geographic heartland of the country and not on a coast.
Visitors to Chicago, except those from Canada or Mexico, have to fly over other cities on the
list.
Another angle for thinking about tourism and Chicago concerns trends across time.
What has been the trend in international visitors? Using the data in Appendix 1, I computed
percentage change in the number of visitors from 2000 to
2008 and from 2005 to 2008. From 2000 to 2008, the
Percentage change is a skill taught
and learned in LSP 120.
number of international visitors to Chicago increased by 1.3%. This is a small increase. One
possible explanation for the small increase is the effect of the terrorist attacks on
September 11, 2001. Those attacks caused a tightening of air travel security and a general
lowering of air travel. Indeed, the number of visitors to the eighteen cities listed in Appendix
1, excluding Flagstaff, AZ, dropped from 30.8 million to 30.0 million, a decrease of 2.7%. By
comparison to that standard, Chicago performed reasonably well. The data show that there
was a remarkable variability in the impact of 9/11 on the flow of international visitors to
different cities. Some cities had large increases. New York’s went up 43.7%; Philadelphia’s
increased 80.1%. Other cities had devastating declines: Honolulu’s dropped by one-third
and San Jose, Dallas, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Tampa all lost more than one-fifth.
The period 2005-2008 shows more substantial growth in international visitors, both
to Chicago and to the nation as a whole. Chicago experiences a 20.7% increase over that
four year stretch, surpassing the 18.2% increase for the other seventeen major destinations
for international visitors. Four cities had a faster rate of increase in number of visitors:
Houston (23.3%), Philadelphia (38.2%), Boston (28.1%), and New York (29.2%). Only two
cities had significant rates of decrease in number of visitors: Honolulu (-21.8%) and
Tampa/St. Petersburg (-19.7%).
I now look at the economic impact of international travel to Chicago. The data I am
using represent the amount of direct spending by international visitors per year, 2001-2008.
The data are from Travel Industry Association of America.3 The trend is presented in Figure
2 (next page). The graph contains two lines. One shows the trend in spending using current
dollar values. In order to insure that the changes represent real changes in the amount
visitors were spending and not just changes in the value
of the dollar due to recession and inflation, I used the
Consumer Price Index to compute the constant dollar
Using the CPI to convert money values
to remove the effects of the changing
value of money is a skill taught and
learned in LSP 120.
value of the spending data. That computation adjusted the data to remove the effect of
3
http://www.choosechicago.com/Document%20Resource%20Gallery/2008ChicagoTravelStatistics.pdf. Accessed
May 14, 2010.
changing value of the dollar. Those results are charted in Figure 2 as the Constant (2008)
Values series. It shows that the trend is real and not an artifact of changing currency values.
The two lines tell roughly the same story. It shows a sharp drop in direct spending in
the first two years of the data series (2001 and 2002) followed by a consistent upward
movement in the amount. This clearly is an effect of September 11th. The comparison of
the current and constant value trends shows an interesting and important subtlety, however.
The current dollar line shows direct spending returning to 2001 amounts by 2004 and
surpassing it by 2005. The constant dollar trend shows that the true economic impact of
9/11 lasted longer. The value stays below 2001 levels through 2006 and only goes higher
in 2007.
The last bit of analysis in this report looks toward the future, specifically with regard
to the economic effect of international travel. I modified Figure 2 in four ways. First, I
removed the current value data in order to focus only on the underlying, real economic
significance of the trends. Second, I removed the data for 2001 and 2002 because they are
anomalous and would distort any projection into the future. (I am assuming, in other words,
no repetition of that horrible event.) Third, I converted the
numbers by dividing each by one million. Finally, I added
a trendline, had the regression equation added to the
Significant time is spent in LSP 120
on the general topic of
mathematical models and on the
use of regression equations for
estimating the growth of variables.
chart, and projected the trendline to 2020, to estimate
what the next ten years will be like. The results are in Figure 3.
The coefficient of determination (R2), at .92, is quite close to 1.0, indicating that
match between the actual data and the underlying mathematical function represented by
the regression equation are closely matched. The equation shows that the amount of direct
spending by international visitors increased, on average, by almost $97 million per year. If
trends continue, international visitors will spend an estimated $2,711,760,000 in Chicago
in 2020. Despite the close fit between the model and the historical data, it would be
reckless to base any plans on the assumption that international travel will reach that level.
Another spectacular act of terrorism in the United States almost certainly would depress it
significantly. Other factors that could reduce the number of international visitors would be a
sustained slowing of the world economy, which would reduce the amount of money that
foreigners would have to spend on travel, and a decline in government services due to the
fiscal problems of the city and the State of Illinois. Nevertheless, there is every reason to
expect that the international travel sector will continue to be a significant portion of the
economy of the global city Chicago.