The obligatory random sports post

There's something that doesn't happen every day.

And I'm surprised that this pick turned out pretty well. I meant to comment on this series sooner because of the Suns "protest" on Cinco de Mayo of the Arizona immigration law (they play in Phoenix). They wore Los Suns jerseys. The Spurs, in a gesture of solidarity recognizing the importance of the moment trumping briefly the trivial concern of winning a basketball game, were going to wear "Los Spurs" but as they were on the road, could not get those jerseys in soon enough to use. Professional basketball is one of the most global and immigrant heavy leagues available (MLB is heavier on the Hispanic population and issued a number of unflattering statements on the Arizona immigration brouhaha), and both the Suns and Spurs have prominent foreign born players on their rosters (Nash is Canadian, woe on to those who worship maple leaves, Barbosa is Brazilian, Ginobili is Argentinian and Parker is French. Technically Duncan is from the US Virgin Islands rather than the mainland).

Naturally a pro sports team is not a microcosm of the world around it. Athletes can be imported without much difficulty and so long as the players in team sports are productive and not genuine assholes, most fans are often indifferent to the national origin. But it does point out something about economics and immigration, namely that Americans should be able to contract with whoever they want, but also that those they contract with should suffer the same advantages as Americans can contract under (if they are under contract to work in America that is). Much of the sensible objections to illegal immigration have less to do with the problems of "Press 1 for English" or random day labourers piling into a truck from Home Depot, but instead to do with the lack of access that these immigrants have to reasonable legal protections. If they are injured, if they have a legal dispute, if someone violates their property, and so on. What it often amounts to is a form of slave labour, disposable and replaceable with other illegals. A quicker and smoother path to legal immigration for work or study would be most effective at alleviating this problem.

Attempting to control the border and to check IDs does little over the problem of 1) lots of illegals who are already here, usually by overstaying a visa not by bounding through deserts and barricades and rancher's lands and 2) the rationale of the illegal who comes here, usually with the purpose of finding work. So long as the incentives are to come here, to work here, and to remain here, people will do so. If they can dunk a basketball and guard the pick and roll, or hit a 95 mph fastball 400 feet, we apparently don't mind. But if they're running the weedwacker next door, apparently that's a problem. More pressing economically, if they can do physics and chemistry related work or computer programming, that's also a problem. Those visa applications fill up in less than a week every year as such workers head instead to Canada and parts of Europe or Asia.