Victor Wembenyama at 2025 NBA Cup. Photograph Source: Daiei Onoguchi – CC BY 4.0
The upcoming June 14 vote on limiting Switzerland’s population to 10 million is a daily reminder here in Geneva that nativist populism remains a powerful political force. In France, Marine Le Pen continues to build support on anti-immigration politics. Nigel Farage pushes similar anxieties in Britain. The AfD does the same in Germany. Donald Trump’s version is familiar: build walls, tighten borders, send ICE into cities. Across much of the West, hostility toward foreigners has become ordinary politics.
Which is why the recent announcement of the National Basketball Association’s All-NBA First Team was so striking. At the very moment politics is warning against outsiders, American sports is celebrating them. Four of the five players selected to the NBA’s top team were born outside the United States. The city game has gone global. (The phrase city game for basketball was popularized in Pete Axthelm’s The City Game, his classic account of New York basketball in the late 1960s.)
Chosen by a panel of 100 sportswriters and broadcasters covering the league, the All-NBA First Team included: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander of the Oklahoma City Thunder, from Canada; Nikola Jokić of the Denver Nuggets, from Serbia; Victor Wembanyama of the San Antonio Spurs, from France; Luka Dončić of the Los Angeles Lakers, from Slovenia. Only Cade Cunningham of the Detroit Pistons was American. Four of the league’s five best players were born abroad, representing four countries and starring in four different American cities.
That is not symbolic. It reflects a broader reality. As of the 2025–26 season, 135 NBA players were born outside the United States, the highest number in league history. They come from 43 countries across six continents. Roughly one in four players in the NBA is now international.
Now, for those who are not basketball fans, allow me to briefly explain the importance of basketball in the United States. It is one of America’s defining sports: invented in Springfield, Massachusetts, and perfected on playground courts like Rucker Park in Harlem. As Vinson Cunningham observed, “Basketball is one of New York’s great public spectacles: you can’t walk far without passing a hoop.” It is American in origin and mythology, embedded in the streets of New York, Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Yet the league’s brightest stars increasingly arrive with accents, translators, and passports from elsewhere.
My beloved New York Knicks reflect the same global pattern: OG Anunoby was born in London, Pacôme Dadiet in France, Ariel Hukporti in Germany, and Karl-Anthony Towns represents the Dominican Republic in international competition.
Although New York’s Madison Square Garden (MSG) is considered the sport’s Mecca, the sport reaches far beyond cities. Even in Midwestern rural states like Indiana, basketball courts are woven into everyday life in countless driveways. “Mr. Indiana Basketball” is a major statewide honor—closer to a civic title than a routine sports award. (For anyone curious about Indiana basketball culture, Gene Hackman’s Hoosiers remains the reference point.)
Basketball is not a simple sports niche—it is a major entertainment industry. The NBA Finals regularly draw between 10 and 20 million U.S. viewers per game. The NBA generates billions in annual revenue; franchise valuations are among the highest in global sports, with a huge merchandising market (jerseys, sneakers, etc.).
Basketball is not alone in this globalization. The pattern of more and more foreign stars repeats in what has long been considered the American sport, baseball. On Major League Baseball’s opening day in 2026, 249 players—26.3 percent of the league—were born outside the United States. The Dominican Republic led with 93 players, Venezuela had 60, Cuba 20, Canada 19, and Japan 14. Others came from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Panama, Curaçao, Colombia, South Korea, Australia, Aruba, the Bahamas, Honduras, Nicaragua, Taiwan, and South Africa.
The reigning king of American baseball is a non-American. Shohei Ohtani, born in Japan, is now arguably the most extraordinary player the sport has ever seen. Both an elite pitcher and an elite hitter, Ohtani rightly challenges Babe Ruth as the sport’s greatest player. He is already a four-time Most Valuable Player winner. More and more postgame interviews now happen through translators because many of the game’s biggest stars, like Ohtani, are not native English speakers.
Politicians increasingly tell voters to fear foreigners. In Switzerland, we are told non-Swiss workers cause traffic jams and drive up housing costs. But Switzerland’s own national soccer team offers a similar picture of globalization. Several of its most prominent players have dual citizenship or family roots abroad. Yet the same anti-immigration voters will root for the entire team during the upcoming World Cup.
Like Swiss soccer fans, Americans cheer foreign-born athletes not despite where they come from but because of what they bring: talent, discipline, style, and victory. Tens of thousands of fans in Oklahoma City rise for a Canadian. Denver adores a Serbian. San Antonio chants for a Frenchman. Los Angeles embraces a Slovenian. Baseball stadiums roar for a Japanese superstar.
Sports does not erase xenophobia. It does not resolve the asylum debate or settle border politics despite the Olympic ideal. There is an important paradox. The rhetoric of exclusion collides every day with a simpler reality: people admire excellence wherever it comes from when it helps their team win. The crowds see winners before they see nationality, even as many of them vote for politicians running on xenophobia. U.S. sports crowds—many of whom voted for Trump and admire his hard line on immigration—seem perfectly happy cheering non-Americans.
The NBA’s first team may say something larger about the country. Politicians may still campaign on borders and walls. Donald Trump and Stephen Miller may continue to denigrate foreigners, but America’s sports fans keep rooting for the world.
To understand the importance of the Knicks to New York, see The New Yorker editor David Remnick’s recent description of the first time the Knicks won the NBA crown: “May 8, 1970, was the night of all sporting New York nights,” he wrote. “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive! So proclaimed the voices of the Knicks: John F. X. Condon at the Garden, Marv Albert on the air.”
How I remember that night! “Bliss it was to be alive.” After decades of waiting to see the Knicks back in the Finals and more than half a century since we last won the title, I just want my team to win this year, no matter who hits the winning baskets, American or otherwise. Go Knicks!
