It's Not a Border Crisis — It's a Humanitarian Crisis: Jonathan Blitzer's "Everyone Who is Gone is Here"
PLUS: Caitlin Clark and the shove heard 'round the world
Last week, President Biden issued an executive order intended to crackdown on the number of migrants crossing into the United States seeking asylum. Biden’s order allows officials to expel asylum-seekers if illegal border crossings exceed a seven-day average of 2,500 crossings, which is a regular occurrence. That policy would lapse once the average number of daily illegal crossings drops below and stays below 1,500 people for at least one week. Additionally, those caught crossing the border illegally would be barred from entering the United States again for five years.
Prior to Biden’s executive order, someone who entered the United States seeking asylum would have been allowed to stay in the country while their case was adjudicated by the court system, which, given the backlog of cases, would have normally taken years. Now, border officials may return most asylum-seekers to Mexico or their home countries within days or even hours. The few exceptions include unaccompanied minors and victims of human trafficking. Asylum-seekers can still have their cases heard if they make an appointment with border officials using an official government app, but there are not enough officials to process everyone requesting entry.
Biden’s order is the most restrictive border policy implemented by a modern Democratic president. It is similar to bipartisan legislation passed earlier this year by the Senate but ignored by the Republican-led House at Donald Trump’s behest so as not to deliver a political victory to Biden in an election year on one of Trump’s signature issues. It also resembles an order issued in 2018 by Trump that Biden condemned and that was ultimately blocked by a federal court. Republicans have criticized Biden’s action as too little, too late; progressives have branded it a betrayal of a core campaign promise.
Biden’s presidency has been bedeviled by the issue of immigration. The number of illegal crossings had plummeted during the pandemic, when Trump closed the border as part of his administration’s response to the health crisis. Entries surged, however, after Biden became president, as many migrants assumed Biden would implement more welcoming policies. The number of individuals crossing the border shot up again after Biden ended Trump’s pandemic-era restrictions in May 2023, peaking at over 300,000 interceptions in November of last year. More recently, the number of migrants entering the United States has dropped significantly as Mexico has taken steps to keep people away from the border.
Over the past forty years, Americans have grown increasingly anxious over the situation at the southern border. Many Americans have come to believe those crossing into the United States from Mexico—at first mainly Mexicans, but then also Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans, and now increasingly Venezuelans, Cubans, Chinese, and Indians—threaten their well-being and social status. Immigrants are often accused of stealing Americans’ jobs, engaging in criminal behavior, straining the social welfare system, and tainting the nation’s cultural heritage, all of which it is said comes at the expense of native-born Americans.
Much of this is hyperbole verging on xenophobia; for instance, immigrants are less likely to commit violent crime than natural-born Americans. Yet some concerns are valid. As a matter of administration, the United States certainly struggles to process the sheer number of people who either are seeking or have gained entry to the country. Not only does this strain communities that deal with large numbers of migrants, but it also often pushes migrants into dangerous situations. Even if one believes current immigration policy could be more accommodating to migrants, the United States still needs guidelines to regulate immigration. Just as it is ridiculous to imagine the United States banning all foreign nationals from entering the country in search of residence, it is impossible to believe the United States could throw its doors open to everyone who wants to live here without severe social disruption.
Psychologically, though, many Americans resent the immigration system because they view it as a government initiative that prioritizes the interests of non-Americans over those of American citizens. That feeling is exacerbated when Americans feel economically and culturally insecure. One way to counter that feeling is by emphasizing the many benefits immigrants bring to American society. Another route would be to share personal stories about the immigrant experience so that Americans can more strongly empathize with those who feel compelled to leave their homes to seek out a better life in the United States. To that end, I would recommend Jonathan Blitzer’s new book Everyone Who is Gone is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis.
Blitzer is a staff writer for the New Yorker. His book shows how, over the past 40-50 years, American foreign policy regarding El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala (the so-called “northern triangle” of Central America) helped spur a mass movement of people out of that region to the United States. It also details how the U.S. government has attempted to manage that influx of migrants all while immigration from Latin America became an increasingly salient political issue. The result has been an administrative and humanitarian crisis whose origins most Americans don’t understand and whose complex reality most Americans refuse to grapple with.
Blitzer’s story begins in the 1970s in El Salvador, where the United States, fearing a communist takeover similar to what happened in Cuba in 1959, had thrown its weight behind an authoritarian right-wing government that cracked down on any sign of dissent. By the late 1970s, guerrilla groups and opposition grassroots organizations began gaining support from university students, teachers, labor unions, farmers, peasants, and Catholic clergy. The most prominent critic of the regime was Óscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, whose assassination in 1980 turned a government-sponsored campaign of terror and torture into a full-blown civil war that would last until early 1992 and claim the lives of over 80,000 people. Throughout the 1980s, the United States provided the Salvadoran government with over $1 billion in aid and helped train the state’s soldiers, many of whom were forced into service upon threat of death.
The Salvadoran Civil War prompted hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans to flee their country to escape violence, persecution, and forced military recruitment. Many travelled across Mexico and entered the United States with the assistance of church-based sanctuary organizations. Unlike Mexican nationals, who were simply dropped off on the other side of the border if apprehended by American INS agents, Salvadorans would be detained if apprehended or denied entry and then deported to El Salvador, where they faced the wrath of the government. One would assume it would have been enough for someone to gain entry to the United States by indicating they were fleeing a civil war stoked by the American government, but throughout the 1980s, Salvadorans could not apply for asylum, as the 1980 Refugee Act passed in response to the Cuban Mariel boatlift was interpreted to limit asylum-seekers to individuals connected to a specific persecuted class and, in practice, was applied only to individuals fleeing nations unfriendly to the United States. By the early 1990s, however, legal victories had extended asylum protections to over three hundred thousand Salvadorans and Guatemalans. Since that time, millions of undocumented migrants have used claims of asylum to gain entry to the country.
By the 1990s, though, the issue of undocumented immigration had gained a foothold in American politics. New legislation signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996 made mass deportation the focus of immigration policy. The legacy of that bill’s enforcement, however, once again revealed how American actions destabilized Central American nations and added to the influx of migrants to the United States. With the INS deporting any undocumented Salvadoran who ran afoul of law enforcement, the American government effectively began deporting the United States’ gang problem to the political vacuum of El Salvador. The notorious MS-13 gang, for instance, actually originated in the US. Gangs soon flourished in Central America, where they forced children to join their ranks and murdered civilians and business people who did not pay them patronage, leading even more people to travel north in search of safety and to enter the United States illegally.
Blitzer shows how the United States has constantly failed to wrap its head around this problem. Political officials who have proposed more permissive or humane solutions to this dilemma often face backlash from voters inflamed by nativist politicians and media figures. Yet voters are also appalled when they learn about the consequences of punitive immigration policies, like Trump’s family separation edict, which sought to deter the wave of families crossing the border by keeping children in the United States while deporting their parents. We see time and time again how policies that sound tough, reasonable, and straightforward to the average American exacerbate the problem, result in unintended consequences, or feed new humanitarian crises. Perhaps most damning, rarely have those policies deterred people from coming to America; sometimes it has only made the journey more dangerous. On top of that, the United States’ decades-long history of heavy-handed and often exploitative relationships with Mexico and other Latin American nations has frequently thrown the region into chaos and fueled migration to the US. (For example, it is estimated one-quarter of El Salvador’s population had travelled to the United States by the end of its civil war in the early 1990s.)
Much of Everyone Who is Gone is Here is devoted to charting the American government’s foreign policy in the Central America and its efforts to police illegal immigration. This is often a legal maze, and Blitzer’s book sometimes gets bogged down in those details. But that’s not the heart of his work, which is built around the personal stories of those who have found themselves caught up in this crisis. As Blitzer shows, many of their experiences are nightmarish, and the United States is often directly responsible for making that so. This is the reason you’ll want to read Blitzer’s book.
At the beginning of the book, Blitzer introduces readers to Juan Romagoza, a physician in El Salvador whose opposition to the Salvadoran military regime eventually led to his detention and torture, which Blitzer describes in agonizing detail. At one point, a physically broken Romagoza is led by his captors into a room full of coffins and thrown into one, where he is left for forty-eight hours. After an uncle obtains his release, Romagoza—suffering from trauma and permanent physical injury and still wanted by the government—escaped to Mexico at the behest of his family; he would leave behind a daughter and a girlfriend, the latter of whom would be killed in a military assault. In Mexico, Romagoza first helped other Salvadorans cross into the United States before entering himself. He would eventually oversee a clinic set up in Washington DC to help the migrant community and advocate on behalf of undocumented immigrants. (Ironically, the military official who oversaw Romagoza’s torture applied and was quickly granted asylum by the United States when he fled the country in 1989; he would finally be held accountable for his crimes and kicked out of the US in 2014.)
Blitzer also shares the story of Eddie Anzora, who came to the United States with his mother and brother in the 1980s from El Salvador when he was three years old. Needless to say, Anzora did not enter the country of his own volition, but when he was arrested for a minor drug charge in the 1990s, the new Clinton-era immigration enforcement rules made it likely he would be deported to a country he barely knew and could hardly claim as home. Despite living on the margins of society, Anzora made a living operating a couple recording studios, organizing concerts, running a fashion line, and publishing a magazine. He had even made enough money to buy a home. His luck ran out one day, however, and he was deported to El Salvador, where he gained employment at a call center and attempted to rebuild his life. This was a dangerous time for someone who spoke Spanish with an American accent to live in El Salvador, as the violent gangs that effectively ran the country assumed new arrivals from the United States were criminals with previously established gang loyalties. Within months of arriving in El Salvador, less than five of the deportees on Eddie’s flight from the United States would still be alive.
Finally, Blitzer chronicles the experiences of Keldy Mabel Gonzáles Brebe de Zúniga, a Honduran who felt increasingly unsafe in her country as it descended into lawlessness following a devastating hurricane, the rise of gang violence, and an extended period of political instability. Her family had already been targeted for extortion, and many of Zúniga’s acquaintances became victims of gang retribution. After filing a police report following the murder of her brother, she and her husband were threatened by men and warned to keep quiet; later, they saw a television news story about someone who had been gunned down while driving a car similar to theirs with similar license plates. It would all eventually prove too much to endure, and lacking any political or legal recourse, the family decided to flee to the United States. Upon entering the US, though, Zúniga’s family was one of the first to fall victim to Trump’s family separation policy. Her children would make their way to Philadelphia while Zúniga waited for years in a dangerous migrant border community in Mexico for the US government to get in touch with her so she could reunite with her family.
These and many of the other stories in Everyone Who is Gone is Here put a face on those with the most at stake in the migrant crisis. Too many Americans believe those who enter the country illegally are simply opportunists hoping to grab a slice of the American pie. Instead, many are making the dangerous trip here as a matter of survival. It makes no sense to tell them the border is closed and that they should stay where they are when the violence, oppression, and economic hardship they are experiencing in their home countries makes their existence there nearly impossible. The risks attendant to the journey—whether family separation, detention, exploitation at the hands of human traffickers, or poor living conditions in a refugee camp—are more tolerable than the dangers they and their families deal with at home. If we saw our neighbors killed on a regular basis, if we felt we could not report crimes to law enforcement without fear of reprisal, if we knew working for political reform could land us in jail, or if we feared our children would need to join gangs to survive, it’s likely we would be on the move, too.
Blitzer does not offer solutions to this crisis in his book, but he does make it clear American foreign and immigration policies—which often treat problems as nails that can be solved with the swift and mighty swing of a hammer—have often made things worse. To make things better, the US will need to build more supportive rather than exploitative relationships with the nations we share this hemisphere with. Americans will also need to stop viewing what is happening as a border crisis that can be ended once and for all with walls, razor wire, detention camps, ICE agents, and tough talk. Instead, we should understand these events as an ongoing humanitarian crisis that will take years, patience, and compassion to resolve.
Signals and Noise
Don Trump: Felon
Former Obama advisor Dan Pfeiffer argues Democrats should be much more aggressive in attacking Trump over his felony conviction. (“A conviction is not going to overtake inflation or abortion for most voters, but it does fit nicely into the story Democrats want to tell. The message is that Donald Trump is a danger to democracy, and he is running for president to help himself, avoid legal accountability, and punish his enemies. The fact that he was convicted of falsifying business records as part of a scheme to interfere in an election seems more than a little relevant. The conviction is not the whole story, but it is a very important piece of evidence. No Democrat should hesitate to make that argument.”)
Eric Levitz of Vox explains why reasonable people can believe the verdict in Trump’s hush money case was wrong.
Matt Lewis of The Daily Beast observes that if elected president, Don Trump wouldn’t be able to carry a gun in his home state but could authorize the launch of a nuclear weapon.
Democracy Watch
Remember “lock her up”? Daniel Dale of CNN tears apart Trump’s claim that he didn’t call for the imprisonment of Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington document the dozens of times Trump has called for the persecution of his own political enemies. And he’s doing it again.
Reuters looks at the outburst of violent rhetoric and calls for riots from the MAGAverse following Trump’s conviction. Aaron Blake of the Washington Post chronicles Trump’s history of violent dog whistles.
Republican Party officials have responded to Trump’s guilty verdict by trashing the legal system and calling for the prosecution of Democrats.
Meanwhile, Oliver Darcy of CNN points out that same rigged legal system this week put the Democratic president’s son on trial this week. (“The cognitive dissonance is remarkable to behold. The same media outlets and figures who have told their audiences that there is a ‘two-tiered justice system’ in America, are now prominently covering a trial in which Biden’s own Justice Department prosecutes his son. If Biden is rigging the justice system, he is doing a lousy job.”)
For an overview of the Hunter Biden case, see Ankush Khardori’s “The Hunter Biden Case Is Solid. There’s Something Rotten About It Too” for Politico.
“What you don’t hear from Joe Biden is any attack on the judge, any attack on the prosecutor, any attack on the process by which his son is currently in federal court; any suggestion that he would misuse the presidential pardon power; any suggestion that his supporters should riot in the streets over it. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has done all of those things, and the difference reveals the difference in their commitment to the rule of law.”—Democratic Delaware Senator Chris Coons (Coons did express some frustrations with the prosecution that Khardori points out in the above article.)
Beth Reinhard of the Washington Post profiles Russ Vought, Trump’s former budget director and potential presidential chief of staff, whose plans for a second Trump presidency are premised on his belief that we are living in “post-constitutional” times.
The Colorado Republican Party began Pride Month with a social media post calling for the burning of Pride flags.
Republican Florida Rep. Byron Donalds told a group of Black voters in Philadelphia that Black families benefited from Jim Crow laws.
Several Republican members of Pennsylvania’s state legislature booed two Capitol police officers who defended the Capitol on 1/6 during a visit to Harrisburg.
Aram Roston of Reuters looks at how the Proud Boys are attempting to regroup and rally around Trump.
ProPublica reports multiple witnesses in Trump’s criminal trials have received raises and new jobs from Trump’s businesses and campaign, sometimes at delicate moments in the legal proceedings. There is no evidence these benefits were exchanged for their loyalty to Trump, but it would be a crime if that was true.
The 2024 Election
If you’re down on Joe Biden’s chances, consider this interview with Democratic pollster Zac McCrary by Theodoric Meyer and Leigh Ann Caldwell of the Washington Post, who’s more optimistic about Biden’s standing at this point in the race.
Trump is apparently “vetting” potential running mates. For what, though? A felony record? All we know is that in order to serve as Trump’s VP, you have to be willing to overturn an election and not brag about shooting your dog.
Ronald Brownstein of The Atlantic writes about how economists believe Trump’s economic plans would supercharge inflation.
Thor Benson of Wired examines how a second Trump administration could weaponize the modern-day surveillance state.
Jeff Stein and Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post detail Trump’s intention to claim sweeping power to cancel congressionally-authorized spending if re-elected president. (“The Constitution gives control over spending to Congress, but Trump and his aides maintain that the president should have much more discretion — including the authority to cease programs altogether, even if lawmakers fund them. Depending on the response from the Supreme Court and Congress, Trump’s plans could upend the balance of power between the three branches of the federal government.”)
Danial Klaidman of CBS News reports on the huge amounts of anonymous dark money donations fueling the 2024 election.
Congress
Richard Rubin of the Wall Street Journal previews the upcoming fight over the expiration of the Trump tax cuts and how congressional Democrats intend to exploit that to their advantage at the end of the year.
Abortion
Marin Wolf of the Dallas Morning Star has a harrowing story about a Texas woman who nearly bled to death during a miscarriage because doctors did not want to perform a medical procedure that might run afoul of Texas’s abortion laws. This happened even though the fetus did not have a heartbeat.
Education
Laura Meckler and Michelle Boorstein of the Washington Post outline the billions of dollars in public money now flowing to private religious schools throughout America via school vouchers.
The Economy
Joe Rennison and Julie Creswell of the New York Times report on a looming economic problem: Empty high-rise office buildings that could sap property tax revenue, hollow out urban centers, and lead to defaults on loans.
At the same time, William H. Frey of Brookings finds the populations of urban centers—which had been hit hard by the pandemic—are bouncing back.
Annie Lowery of The Atlantic looks at the development of standards boards and how unions have used them to improve wages and working conditions for non-unionized industries.
International News
In a surprise result, the party of India’s populist Hindu-nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi will return to power but will not only fall short of the predicted landslide but will need to rely on its allies to form a majority government. Exit polls had projected Modi’s party was on track to win two-thirds of the seats in the Indian Parliament, but that result did not come to bear.
Ellen Ioanes of Vox fills you in on what you should know about Claudia Sheinbaum, who was just elected Mexico’s first female and first Jewish president.
Related: With the Biden administration and Mexico negotiating over immigration policy, Stephania Taladrid of The New Yorker asks “Will Mexico Decide the U.S. Election?”
The ANC, the organization that led the fight against apartheid in South Africa and that, as a party, has ruled that country for the past thirty years, lost its majority in the South African national assembly for the first time since South Africa became a democracy. It remains the largest party in parliament, but will need to form a coalition with another party to form a majority.
Matthew Kaminski of Politico has a good overview of the elections in India, Mexico, and South Africa and what they mean for the world and American foreign policy.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff of the New York Times looks at what is at stake in this weekend’s European Union elections, where unity vs. nationalism is on the ballot yet again.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is threatening an “extremely powerful” response to an uptick in attacks from Hezbollah originating from Lebanon.
Daphné Richemond-Barak writes in Foreign Affairs about how Hamas has reinvented underground warfare.
Catherine Belton and Souad Mekhennet of the Washington Post dig into Russia’s efforts to use money to co-opt far-right politicians in Europe.
Republican Alabama Senator and Local Idiot Tommy Tuberville told Steve Bannon on his podcast that Vladimir Putin—who once said Ukraine is connected to Russia “by blood”—“doesn’t want Ukraine” since Russia already has enough land of its own.
Garbage Time: Caitlin Clark and the Shove Heard ‘Round the World
(Garbage Time theme song here)
Call it the Shove Heard ‘Round the World. Last weekend, Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever were hosting the Chicago Sky in a nationally televised WNBA game. Clark had been going at with Sky guard Chennedy Carter; apparently some elbows were thrown and words were exchanged in the heat of play. But then, after the Sky had scored a bucket and Clark went to receive the inbounds pass from teammate Aliyah Boston, this happened:
Carter was called for an away-from-the-ball foul and the Fever were awarded a free throw attempt, which Clark converted. That was far from the end of it, though.
Clark’s fans were immediately up in arms, pointing to the incident as the most egregious example yet of the physical beating Clark has endured since entering the league. Current and former WNBA players pushed back by noting the league has long featured physical play and that rookie players have always struggled to adjust to its rough and tumble competition. Some analysts, sensing veteran WNBA players were targeting Clark out of jealousy or as an overhyped and unproven rookie, called on the league to intervene and for Clark’s rivals to go easier on Clark, since the former Iowa Hawkeye was driving newfound interest in women’s basketball, packing arenas, and generating millions of dollars in new revenue for the WNBA. Some of the discourse turned ugly, as some of Clark’s fans attacked Carter with racially-charged language, which led others to remind those following the story that Clark is the latest iteration of American sports’ “Great White Hope” and that she has had advantages and opportunities that are usually harder to come by for similarly situated Black athletes. The back-and-forth became cringeworthy at times, with NBA players and established male pundits appearing to lecture people affiliated with the WNBA (which has been around for 28 years) on how all this professional sports stuff is supposed to work.
All of which leads me to think maybe I should just sit this one out. But I do have some thoughts I’d like to share. Before I do that, though, I should mention a couple things. First, prior to this season, I have not watched many WNBA games, so I can’t claim any expertise about the league or its development. Secondly, I feel very protective of Caitlin Clark. I root hard for her as an Iowan and want her to succeed. She is as exciting an athlete as Michael Jordan, Sammy Sosa, and Stephen Curry, whose exploits I followed religiously. I was watching the game live when Carter knocked her to the floor; I reacted furiously. Thankfully, though, I’ve had a week to ruminate on what happened.
To begin with, everyone needs to lay off Chennedy Carter. I understand she has a checkered history as a player in the league, but what she did to Clark was fairly mild as far as non-basketball plays go. Give it a 4 out of 10 in that regard: No punches were thrown, it wasn’t vicious, it was over as soon as it started. It definitely wasn’t an “assault” as the Chicago Tribune so claimed. This season has seen worse. If it had been called a technical foul as it should have been (the league upgraded the foul to flagrant the following day) it would not have merited an ejection. Furthermore, it’s easy to imagine most other players—including Clark—doing something similar in the heat of competition. When play gets chippy, things like this happen. It’s unfortunate when it does, but it’s part of the game. While you don’t have to like Carter, she doesn’t deserve to be demonized. That can lead to some pretty scary stuff, such as when Carter found herself berated by a crazed fan during Chicago’s trip to DC this past week.
Everyone should also take some time to reflect on how Americans’ racial attitudes have shaped the public’s perceptions of not only the Clark-Carter beef but of the status of white and Black athletes in American life. Consider how much easier it is for the public to turn Carter into an irredeemable villain on account of stereotypes they hold about her skin color, or how eager many might be to view this incident between a white woman and a Black woman in a league in which 70% of the players are Black as a microcosm of race relations in the United States today even though no racial animus that we know of exists between the two women. It’s also worth thinking about how Clark’s skin color (and sexual orientation for that matter) contribute to her superstardom. One can say ball don’t lie and that all those logo-threes she made in college earned her that attention, but those features of her identity made her a more palatable icon for many and likely opened up commercial opportunities closed to other athletes.
Moving on to the physical nature of the game, it’s ridiculous to argue WNBA players ought to go easy on Clark or give her a break as a sign of thanks for bringing more fans to the league or so she can succeed and keep those fans engaged (and thus pump up revenue.) Clark certainly doesn’t expect that. She knows everyone in the WNBA is there to win and wants to perform at the peak of their abilities, and that she’ll need to prove she belongs in this league with her play on the court. We shouldn’t expect other players to go easy on her either.
We also shouldn’t be surprised to find Clark has been physically overmatched in the WNBA during her rookie campaign. Clark knew this would be an issue coming into the WNBA. It’s not simply her on-court production: While Clark leads all rookies and ranks in the top twenty among all players in scoring and is fourth in the league in assists per game, she is shooting an underwhelming 35.7% from the field and less than 30% from beyond the arc while leading the WNBA in turnovers per game (5.4; the next closest player is barely averaging 4.) It’s also glaringly obvious to anyone watching that she lacks the physical strength veteran players have developed to thrive in the league. She’s reminded two or three times a game that the WNBA ain’t beanbag:
Despite this, based on the various WNBA games I’ve watched so far this season, it sure seems like it’s open season on Clark. She gets beat up a lot. Some of that is explicable. With experience, she’ll get better at avoiding contact. Given the lack of depth on the Fever, it also makes sense for opposing teams to throw multiple defenders at Clark and knock her around. But it seems to go beyond that as well. I don’t know if players are targeting her as a rookie, out of jealousy, or to take her down a notch, but she is taking a bruising. I don’t think I’m writing that from a fan’s perspective, either: UCONN coach Geno Auriemma thinks as much as well.
Commentators and former players who insist the shove and Clark’s rough introduction to the league are just representative of the physical nature of the WNBA have left me questioning their perspective on the issue. Hip checks aren’t basketball plays and aren’t considered basketball plays in junior high, high school, college, the NBA, international competition, or local pick-up games. Do that in your rec league and you may not be invited back. To claim that what happened to Clark is normal suggests to me they’re either a.) Happy to see Clark getting beat up; or b.) Confused about the meaning of “normal.”
It’s probably some combination of both, but I’ll say it’s more b.) than a.). Again, I haven’t watched much professional women’s basketball outside of this season, but so far I’ve been surprised by how physical the WNBA is. It’s not that I’m expecting less physical play from professional women basketball players. It’s that compared to all the other basketball I’ve watched so far this year (with maybe the exception of a DC high school boys tournament I attended back in February) the WNBA seems much rougher. Just to illustrate my point, a few weeks ago, at the conclusion of a Fever game, I flipped over to an NBA game and was surprised to find how little contact the players were making with one another. Not only was that after the NBA told officials to allow more physical play to cut down on excessive scoring, but the game I turned to was also a playoff game, when refs typically allow players to get away with rougher play.
I have no idea how to gauge when play gets too physical in basketball. For most people, it’s a matter of aesthetics. Maybe the NBA isn’t physical enough. It could be the WNBA has it just right. But here’s why I don’t think that’s the case: After Chennedy Carter hip-checked Caitlin Clark ninety feet from the basket when Clark had yet to get ball, the official standing over a fallen Clark blew his whistle and called it a common foul. In no universe is that a common foul. In the WNBA, however, it was treated as normal.
That to me is the real issue. If a referee can’t distinguish between a basketball play and a non-basketball play, that suggests to me the WNBA is probably too physical. Knowing that, I’d recommend the WNBA instruct officials to call the game tighter to make play less physical. This isn’t just to make it easier on Clark but to protect the other players on the court from injury as well. That’s imperative because Clark is the catalyst behind a Magic-Bird moment in the WNBA when a whole new crop of fans are starting to tune into games not because they’re fans of “the game” but because they want to see the stars. Eventually, they won’t just be tuning in see Clark; soon enough, they’ll also want to follow A’ja Wilson and Sabrina Ionescu, along with soon-to-be pros like Paige Bueckers and JuJu Watkins. No one wants to watch those players limp off a court mid-game or sit on the bench in street clothes because the beating they’ve taken game after game after game has finally taken its toll.
This is the direction other major sports leagues in the United States have moved in. Major League Baseball has eliminated home plate collisions, and players are almost never allowed to take out an infielder turning a double play at second with a hard slide. If a pitcher hits a batter, the umpire may issue warnings to both benches even if the pitch wasn’t thrown with intent. There’s no mistaking the style of play in the NBA for what it was like during the Detroit Pistons’ “Bad Boys” era of the late 80s. NBA players can get called for flagrant fouls for inadvertently striking an opponent in the head. The NFL would wrap its quarterbacks in bubble wrap if it could; absent that, they’ve legislated many of the most vicious and dangerous hits out the game. This year, the NFL will dramatically change kickoffs to make the most dangerous play in football safer. All of this is done in the name of player safety, but it also helps keep star players—the athletes fans want to see—on the field of play.
The WNBA may resist such changes by claiming physical play is what sets their league apart. Doing so, however, may instead be another sign the league has ascended to major American sports league status.