Basketball, Trade, and Immigration
(Seven things worth knowing before you read this:
- This was written near the beginning of the current 2015/2016 NBA season.
- I know nothing about basketball.
- I don’t even know who won this season.
- I know nothing about basketball.
- I wrote this to play with some pro sports immigration data, not to further my knowledge of basketball.
- I know nothing about basketball.
- And, oh yes, I know nothing about Medium either.
)
They are pouring into the U.S. from around the world, looking for work. There are coming from Canada, from Africa, from Brazil, from Asia, and from across eastern Europe. And they are taking Americans’ high-paying jobs — and yet, no-one is complaining.
“They” are professional basketball players. We are hovering at record numbers of foreigners (internationals in the National Basketball Association’s sanitized parlance) in the just-started 2015–2016 NBA season: there are more than one hundred players who, when signed, were born and living outside the U.S. At twenty-two percent of the league, that is much higher than football and similar to baseball, but growing faster than either. The number of foreign basketball players has almost quintupled since 1990 when there were only 21 players from abroad. High-profile new foreign players will be making their debuts this season, like the Orlando Magic’s Mario Hezonja of Croatia. (When playing previously, in Barcelona, Mr. Hezonja was asked if he had seen Barcelona soccer star Leo Messi play, and he said “Messi should come see me”. He’ll fit in swimmingly in the NBA.)
Why are players like Mr. Hezonja so eager to play in the U.S.? It’s not because the NBA can’t find enough enough U.S. citizens who want to play basketball here. Far from it. Basketball is among the most popular team sports in the U.S., consistently ranking first or second in participation. And U.S.-born players are good too. Out of the top 25 of all time, the U.S. has produced 24 or 25, depending on the survey, and depending on your view of Hakeem Olajuwon.
It also not as if there aren’t other leagues elsewhere in which top foreign players could play. Basketball’s popularity has ballooned worldwide, with widely-followed leagues in Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America. And many of those leagues pay well, even if not at the WTF? levels of the NBA.
So why all the immigrants? It is because the NBA is (by any reasonable measure) the best professional basketball league in the world; because the best players want to play in the best league; because basketball is played all over the world; and because U.S. sports immigration policy lets the best of those players come here.
But where is the political outrage? Why aren’t we debating building a wall (fine, a high wall) to keep out foreign basketball players? Because of immigrants flooding to this country, one hundred skilled Americans aren’t getting multi-million dollar jobs . At 22% of all players, foreigners are a much higher percentage of the NBA than they are of the broader economy (where 16% is non-U.S. workers). Immigration is a hot-button topic in this country, with protectionism rising, but on pro sports immigration, the average American is a George-Mason-University-economics-department-open-borders-absolutist.
Why? Because, when it comes to pro sports, Americans intuitively understand immigration. They understand that to be competitive at the highest levels of sports, having the highest level of skill matters. If you want to be the best at “producing” something, even if it is getting a 29.5-inch ball through a 10-foot high hoop, then you need the best people, borders schmorders.
It’s a savvy insight, one borne out by comparative global basketball. The best leagues in the world — Spain and the U.S. — have the least obstacles to player immigration. The less competitive leagues — like Brazil — have some of the highest immigration barriers.
Within the NBA, immigration effects can be seen right down to the team level. The San Antonio Spurs, the team with the most foreign players, has won the league two of the the last three seasons. (The team that won last year, the Golden State Warriors, is right behind San Antonio in non-U.S. players.) Teams with some of the lowest numbers of internationals, like the Philadelphia 76ers, generally cluster at the bottom of the end-of-season win/loss percentage column. In short, such teams are crap.
We’re not talking tiny differences here. If you segment the NBA, calling teams with four or more foreign players “High Internationals”, and the rest “Low Internationals”, toss the outliers, and then test the difference in mean winning percentages, it’s 58% vs 46% (which is statistically significant at the 0.05 level — shout-out to fellow math types). The mean gains in season winning percentages tied to lower age, greater height, or more weight are all less important than the effect of simply having more players from somewhere else.
(Quick digression: Guess the number one source of foreign basketball players to the U.S. Give up? It’s Canada. Hey, I was surprised by that too. But, like comedians in Los Angeles, where Canadians are nigh ubiquitous, you can’t seemingly toss a ball in the NBA without hitting a Canadian.)
Given the benefits, it seems obvious that there will be more foreign players in the U.S. in future. First, there is, in economics terms, a kind of free lunch, with material gains in winning percentage merely from having more players not from this country. Second, American sports fans clearly support the idea, with no hashtag campaign in San Antonio (#SpursForSpurs!) against too many foreigners playing in Spurs games. Third, there is a huge and growing supply of talented foreign players.
Why hasn’t this immigration insight and open borders absolutism infected the average American’s thinking about the broader economy? After all, there is a free lunch there too, with most economists in broad agreement that more skilled U.S. immigration would be beneficial to economic growth, as well as helping inject youth into an aging society.
But Americans don’t like non-sports immigration. Why? Because, to borrow the tagline from “Jaws: The Revenge”, this time it’s personal. Everyone is, to a degree, protectionist about their own job, and even more so if you’re at the low-skill end of things, which characterizes the majority of current immigrants to this country.
It isn’t even clear that American long-term support for open sports immigration will be unwavering. While Americans like the benefits now when it comes to foreign players, like the entertaining Mr. Hezonja, they haven’t thought it through. How will they feel, perhaps a decade away, if the NBA becomes dominated by foreign players, as is currently the case in soccer’s Premier League, which was once full of domestic players? Yes, that hasn’t hurt the Premier League’s popularity — it draws huge UK audiences and has lucrative television rights deals — but it has had knock-on effects. For example, teams, perhaps playing to the locals, overpay for British players, and loudly overestimate how good they can be. (It’s good for t-shirt sales: Hello, Raheem Sterling!).
A reasonable bet, on current trends, is that one day NBA fans will find themselves in a similar situation: They will be following a U.S. league dominated by players from elsewhere. The quality of play will be even better than it is today; the jerseys from the few remaining domestic players will be over-priced; and the sports open borders absolutists will have only themselves to blame.
Will all of this immigration enlightenment ever cross over into the broader economy? I’m not counting on it — at least not unless we all become pro athletes.
