Sunday, February 14, 2010

Dan Walters: Openness of U.S. borders is dilemma

The professional football season has ended. Baseball is a couple of months away, but a die-hard fan still has plenty of midwinter sports on the tube, not even counting the Winter Olympics.

Basketball, both pro and collegiate, hockey and soccer games are available daily. As one samples the video fare, the internationalization of sports quickly becomes evident.

While there are few non-Americans playing professional football in the United States, pro basketball and hockey teams have scores of Canadian, European, Asian, African – and even Middle Eastern – players. The summer sport, baseball, is filled with Latinos

As foreigners, they must obtain special work visas to practice their trades and collect millions of dollars from their teams. We have chosen, as a nation, to say that if the Sacramento Kings' Israeli star Omri Casspi, to cite one example, wants to work in America, that's fine and dandy – a win-win for everyone, even if the Kings don't often win.

The same is true when American universities offer professorships to noncitizen scholars, when a corporation hires a foreign executive, or when a high-tech company recruits engineers. We're happy to have them come to America to earn and spend money and help our nation prosper. (February 14, 2010)

http://www.sacbee.com/politics/story/2535895.html

Posted by: Uriel Lopez

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