MLB rosters by birthplace –
All players | 969 |
U.S.* | 719 |
Dominican Republic | 104 |
Venezuela | 62 |
Cuba | 21 |
Mexico | 15 |
Canada | 10 |
Japan | 8 |
Colombia | 7 |
11 other countries | 23 |
* Includes 15 Puerto Rican players, whom MLB for some reason counts as “international.”
Cuban-born Adolis Garcia’s 11th-inning walk-off won Game 1 for the Rangers on Friday night; Venezuelan catcher Gabriel Moreno’s 2nd-inning home run started the Diamondbacks’ 9-1 rout on Sunday’s Game 2. The two teams together feature 12 international players: six Dominicans, three Venezuelans, and three Cubans as the Series began; still seven as they prepare for Game 5 but now seven, three, and two respectively given Garcia’s Game 3 injury and replacement last night by Dominican shortstop Ezequiel Duran. Altogether, they make up 24% of the Series rosters. This figure:
(a) Pretty closely matches the 26.5% international share of MLB’s full Opening Day rosters, and likewise faithfully reflects the roles of the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and Cuba as the top three contributors;
(b) Is also quite close to the 25% international-player share of the roughly 4200 pro athletes playing this year in the six big North American pro leagues (MLB, NBA, WNBA, NFL, MLS, and NHL); and
(c) Is a bit above the 18% overall international share of the American workforce, but typical of top-tier elite working life. Some context for this last point:
The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Labor Characteristics of the Foreign-Born Workforce release comes out each May. Its most recent edition reports 158.3 million people working in the U.S. last year, of whom 28.7 million or 18% were born abroad. The foreign-born workforce is growing relatively faster than the native-born on net — the BLS release finds total U.S. employment up 5.7 million from 2021 to 2022, with foreign-born labor up 2.3 million workers and U.S.-born by 3.4 million. This “net growth” figure, though, conceals the fact that most of the 3.6 million workers who retire each year are locally born, so the actual “gross” count of new jobs for native-born Americans was probably more like 6 million.
Looking past these top-line figures to specific industries, the foreign-born labor shares represent a sort of classic “smile curve,” with immigrant contributions highest in the best-paying and lowest-paying sections of the economy, and lower in the middle. At the very top, MLB’s 250 international players join 60% of this year’s 20 Oscar acting nominees and 50% of the six U.S.-based 2023 Nobel Prize laureates in science and economics. At the lower-paying end, USDA’s Economic Research Service reports that about 60% of crop-pickers on American farms as of 2022 are immigrants, and BLS finds foreign-born employment shares between 20% and 30% in construction, groundskeeping, domestic and personal care services, and food preparation. An illustrative table with immigrant labor shares, using 2023 when possible and otherwise picking the most recent year available:
Crop-picking farmworkers | 60% |
Computer science doctorates | 60% |
2023 Oscar nominees | 60% |
All farmworkers | 44% |
Doctoral-level science & tech workers | 40% |
Construction workers | 34% |
Major-league athletes | 25% |
Food service |
23% |
Personal care & services | 20% |
All science & tech workers | 19% |
All U.S. workers | 18% |
Management jobs | 14% |
Education & training | 12% |
Health care practitioners | 10% |
Lawyers & paralegals |
6% |
Security services | 6% |
Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics for all workers, National Science Foundation for engineering and science workers; MLB, NBA, WNBA, MLS plus outside writers on hockey and football for athletes.
Turning back to the Series, though, the nationalities of Garcia, Moreno, their MLB teammates and rivals, and by extension, the nationalities of U.S. workers generally, are interesting both as background for fans watching the game and as illustrations of the evolution of the economy and working life. But what they’re actually doing is the main thing. The manager’s perspective: Don’t overthink it. Play ball.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ most recent Labor Characteristics of the Foreign-Born Workforce brief, out May 2022.
More on sports:
MLB: The 2023 Opening Day baseball rosters featured 250 foreign-born players or 26.5% of the 969 players variously out on the grass (or the “artificial turf” used in the Rangers’ Globe Field and the Diamondbacks’ Chase Stadium), riding the bench, or on the DL. Of these, 104 were Dominican, 62 Venezuelan, 21 Cuban, 15 Mexican, 10 Canadian, 8 Japanese,* 7 Colombians, and the remaining 23 are divided among eleven countries.
NBA: If MLB scouts spend most of their time on the Caribbean littoral, with frequent side trips to Japan and Taiwan, the NBA’s talent-spotters have to span the globe. The league’s opening tipoffs last week featured 125 international players among 450 players, or 28% of the total including as a sample 26 Canadians, 14 French, 9 Australians, six Nigerians, five Turks, three from Cameroon, three Lithuanians, one Georgian and one from South Sudan, three from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, two Bahamians, two Japanese, two Ukrainians, six Germans and so on across 40 countries.
WNBA: The NBA’s sister league is slightly less “international,” though not dramatically so, with 30 international players among the 164 women on all 12 teams combined. Australia led with 7, Canada 4, Hungary, France, and China two each; this year’s champion Las Vegas Aces was unusual in having just one international player, Australian center Cayla George.
MLS: U.S. pro soccer is majority international, with 350 Americans and 440 international players. The league fudges the data a bit by declaring Canadians “domestic,” so as to get a North American 50.1% majority player share. The next biggest countries are Argentina with 40 players on North American pitches, Brazil with 34, and Colombia with 25.
NFL: Least “international” of the big U.S. pro leagues, the NFL is also distinctly less analyst-friendly since it doesn’t appear to provide a distinct count of international players. Wikipedia reports 106 of them (counting American Samoa), while NBC’s Chicago affiliate argues for 82. Given 1,676 total players, we can compromise on roughly 6%.
NHL: The “nation” in “National Hockey League”, finally, is not the United States but Canada, home to 295 of this year’s 506 skaters. The rest split equally between the U.S. and Europe — 205 Americans, 206 Europeans — with the top European contingents including 64 Swedes, 41 Russians, 36 Finns, and 23 Czechs.
A look back:
Some historical data on U.S. immigrant labor from the Migration Policy Institute.
International perspective:
The International Labor Organization counts 169 million “international migrant” workers as of 2019. This meshes imperfectly with the BLS’ count of the American workforce, as the ILO uses “all foreign-born workers” for countries that record these figures, but only “migrant” [i.e. non-citizen] workers for some other countries. This noted, the ILO report finds 32% of the world’s migrant workers in Europe, 22% in Canada and the U.S., 15% in the Middle East, and 14% in Asia and the Pacific. ILO on migrant workers.
Or, taking a global view, the World Bank’s figures for immigrant shares of the population (rather than workforce participation) place the U.S.’ 14.5% immigrant share of the population a) far below the majority-immigrant populations of the Persian Gulf, which run as high as 88% for the United Arab Emirates; (b) well above the mostly local East Asian workforces, with those of China and Vietnam the world’s lowest at 0.1% and (c) in the middle of the 8%-25% range of other large, wealthy western countries such as Canada, Italy, the U.K., Germany, France, or Australia.
And for comparison:
Hollywood’s 2023 Oscar nominees, tracing birth to Malaysia, Ireland, Vietnam, U.K., Australia, and more
The 2023 Nobel Prizes; Weissman, Goldin, and Brus are Massachusetts, New York, and Cleveland; Katariko, Bawendi, and Yekimov respectively born in Hungary, France, and Russia.
USDA’s look at America’s 1.18 million hired farmworkers.
And the National Science Foundation on the American sci/tech workforce; 19% international overall, with India the top source followed by China and the Philippines.
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank Progressive Economy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
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