The idea is not new, but it grows stronger with each statistic.
The latter indicates that due to trips abroad, 2025 will end with a historic dollar inflow. Expectations, which used to be around US$10 billion, now reach US$13 billion.
“This year 9.7 million Argentines left, while 4.1 million tourists entered, “With a deficit of 5.6 million passengers.” Analyzed by Marcos Cohen-Arazi, of IERAL, in Clarion.
The premise behind this “traveller shortage” is easy to summarize: Foreign trips are a waste of dollars.
This is obvious, but it ends with a moral assessment: trivial travel harms the economy.
The story did not come out of nowhere, the time of “Sweet Silver” and “Give Me Two” shaped it, and other voices reinforced it. It is remembered The fleeting minister, Sylvina Pattakis, is unforgettable “The right to travel collides with job creation.”
Complete in a more stigmatizing way: “When you buy abroad…we destroy the future of all Argentines.” (Months later it was found in an Apple Store in Manhattan.)
The accusation is very serious. Leaving Al-Aziza harms our children and grandchildren. You have to be a very bad person to do that.
But Patakis wasn’t the only one.
More here in due course. “We have to try to prevent people from traveling around the world,” Bechetto stressed.
The phrase is brutally descriptive because it suggests prohibition, and connotes unnecessary luxury.
The purely economic and morphological problem is not discussed here, however The meaning is gathered from that reality. It is a valid discussion because this narrative shapes political positions and even assumed moral qualities.
Those who spend the summer in Mar del Plata are patriots, and those who go to Florida are traitors.
It reinforces a bias in the collective imagination: Argentines travel to Miami just to buy iPhones. The absurdity given to the uninterested middle class in Argentina.
But the connotation would be completely different if one thought of Argentines traveling to Spain to meet their birth families and visit the Prado Museum. Which of course also exists. And they are not few.
The critical view also underestimates a crucial fact: the prices and alternatives offered at different destinations. Can’t the Argentines, far from absurdity, evaluate the costs in detail and decide rationally? The most chosen destinations since Miley took charge have been Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, and the reason, at least in the first two cases, is the prices. Beyond the superficiality of Miami, most endure hours of waiting at the border with Chile to get goods at half the price or less. Who can judge them for that?
The discussion will continue as long as Argentina cannot generate enough dollars. But it’s time to give it another frame and Stop referring to travelers as anti-nationals responsible for foreign currency shortages. Travel is not the cause of the macroeconomic problem. Even to Miami to buy the latest iPhone.