Smuggling Baseball Players?

I must say that I have never been a big fan of the special treatment that elite athletes have received from the U.S. government under our immigration laws.  But, this Vanity Fair article left me wondering whether we had better things to do than go after baseball player “traffickers” bringing players from Cuba.

Gus Dominguez, an L.A. sports agent, now he sits in jail, convicted of smuggling athletes. Before he became a casualty in the immigration wars, Gus Dominguez was just another agent in Los Angeles. Then, on October 20, 2006, the United States government issued its first-ever indictment for smuggling athletes into the country, with Dominguez cast as the mastermind. The alleged contraband: five Cuban baseball players. Specifically, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida claimed that Dominguez had identified four pitchers and a shortstop in Havana and then paid $225,000 to smugglers to sneak them by boat to Florida and drive them to California, where he auctioned them off to Major League Baseball teams.

Dominguez had made his mark as the agent who, back in the early 1990s, invented the market for Cuban baseball playerst. Several aspects of the case remarkably dissimilar to anything that had ever happened before. Up to the moment he turned himself in to the law, Dominguez had been a model citizen. He was 48 years old, with nothing worse than a parking ticket against his name.

Our border enforcement at work!

KJ