In defense of President Joe Biden’s open borders policies, The Washington Post argues the drugs, crime, and economic turmoil caused by mass immigration should be tolerated since an infinitesimally small number of immigrants go on to become professional baseball stars. Poet and creative writing professor Jaswinder Bolina argues in an essay for the paper’s opinion page that the few “exorbitantly talented” immigrants who play professional sports are reason enough to leave the U.S. border open.
“While that inhospitable bunch has been villainizing migrants and refugees as a strain on U.S. resources, I have been marveling at how much foreign-born players have enlivened (and enriched) baseball in recent decades,” he writes, referring to former President Donald Trump and his millions of supporters across the country. Bolina, a professor of creative writing at the University of Miami in Florida, goes on to argue that the “increasing number of foreign-born major leaguers now counted among the best in the game’s long history dispels the self-aggrandizing myth that the United States possesses any monopoly on excellence.”
Voters concerned about the social and economic costs of mass immigration are “guilty of offensive fixation on national origin, ethnicity, and race,” according to Bolina. Critics of the Biden government’s policy granting mass asylum to illegal immigrants, the creative writing professor argues, “mistake a person’s predicament for a person’s potential.”
The topics of systemic racism, ‘whiteness,’ identity, Donald Trump, and immigration are a fixation of Bolina, featuring heavily in his poetry and writing. According to his essay “Writing Like a White Guy,” Bolina’s father told him to write under a white-sounding pseudonym because no one would publish a non-white poet. His father claims to have been passed over for promotion because he wasn’t white.
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