Editorial | Travel bans and global sport

It is probably too late to consider removing the United States as a host of next year’s football World Cup.

And in any event, it is unlikely that Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, the governing body of world football, would even contemplate the idea. For Mr Infantino has grown so chummy with Donald Trump that he even turned up hours late for the start of his own federation’s congress in Paraguay last month because he was travelling in the Middle East with the US president. His behaviour so incensed some European delegates, including German Football Federation boss Bernd Neuendorf and UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin, that they staged a brief walkout of the congress.

Nonetheless, given America’s widening travel ban on countries around the world, including its threats against some in the Caribbean, it is important that global sporting organisations seriously begin to recalibrate invitations to the United States to host international events.

Indeed, it is not only the next year’s World Cup, which the US will co-host with Canada and Mexico, that is on the agenda, in the near term, for the United States. In 2028, Los Angeles will be the venue of the summer Olympics.

Jamaica, which begins the next round of its campaign in September, has a good shot at being among the 48 teams qualifying for the World Cup. But as a relative minnow in global football, it will have little influence on the calculus employed by Mr Infantino and his colleagues at FIFA in deciding on what terms, and where, tournaments are held.

CAN’T BE IGNORED

However, Jamaica is a global power in track and field athletics. While that isn’t backed by economic strength, its voice can’t be ignored in the forums where the big decisions on international track and field athletics are made. At least, it should not be allowed to be.

In that regard, the Jamaica Athletics Administrative Association (JAAA) and the Jamaica Olympic Association (JOA), and other sporting bodies, including the Jamaica Football Federation (JFF), should begin to make clear their disaffection with the idea of their athletes performing in global games in countries from which the citizens of between a quarter and 30 per cent of the world’s states and territories are banned.

Last week President Trump instituted an outright ban on travel to the United States of passport holders from 12 countries, including Caribbean Community (CARICOM) member, Haiti. The others were: Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. Additionally, tight visa restrictions were placed on Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Turkmenistan, Burundi, Venezuela and Togo.

Since then, the Washington Post newspaper reported on a leaked State Department document showing that the US was considering travel restrictions on 36 other countries. The Post essentially confirmed an earlier story by the New York Times, which had placed four other CARICOM countries – Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, St Kitts and Nevis, and St Lucia – on a potential US blacklist for visas because of their citizenship-by-investment schemes, which, except for the price, are not unlike what Mr Trump recently proposed for the United States to attract the world’s richest people.

The Gleaner fully accepts – as we noted when the possibility of visa restrictions against CARICOM members was first mentioned – the right of countries to have control over their borders.

CONCEPTUALLY WRONG

But there is something conceptually wrong about blanket, or near full, bans on the citizens of some countries, rather than the targeted exclusion of known bad actors or people against whom there is evidence or good intelligence of their ill-intent. The situation is more perverse when large swathes of countries are excluded, while the country imposing the ban seeks glory by playing host to marquee events – like the Olympics and the World Cup, or the CONCACAF Gold Cup, now being hosted by the US and Canada.

Mr Trump’s travel ban, of course, exempts “any athlete or member of an athletic team, including coaches, persons performing a necessary support role, and immediate relatives, travelling for the World Cup, Olympics, or other major sporting event as determined by the Secretary of State”.

There are two observations about this exemption. First, in tone at least, if not intent, it positions athletes like minstrels performing at court for the higher citizenry, and excluding the other. It is not beyond the realm of reasonable imagination, given Mr Trump’s past remarks about immigration and immigrants, that foreign attendees at global sporting events in the United States would preferably be northern Europeans. Or the citizens of very rich countries with which the United States has transactional relationships.

Second, America’s wealth and sporting infrastructure would otherwise make it an ideal host for global sporting events, but travel bans, in the form imposed by President Trump, undermine the ideal of inclusiveness celebrated by most international sporting organisations.

Indeed, FIFA’s portrayal of the World Cup as more than a sporting event, but as symbol of unity and cultural exchange could lose much of its sheen. It is the same ideal that the Olympic portrays to the world’s youth, which is something that the new IOC president, Kirsty Coventry, as a white Zimbabwean, should understand.

It is also why she should hear it from Jamaica, and the reason for her to have a forthright conversation with the Trump administration.