Don't give a puck most NHL players aren't U.S.-born? You can embrace foreign students too.
With just five Americans on its roster, the Florida Panthers won the Stanley Cup again last month, claiming their second consecutive championship. That’s right: Only 20% of the team is U.S.-born. That's not an anomaly. Leaguewide, about 70% of the players come from other countries.
No one has heard President Donald Trump or Vice President JD Vance complain about foreign infiltration in hockey. Rather, they are irked by Harvard's roughly 27% international student population. Why single out Harvard University or other higher education institutions? Doesn’t "the best and the brightest" apply to universities?
Certainly the administration knows that narrowing the filter would diminish American students’ global competitiveness. Hence, why construct a straw man argument in which foreign students are replacing Americans as Vance claims? Why object to Chinese students seeking an American education in their field of choice?
All of these questions have answers the White House would rather not hear. In the NHL, 41% of players are from Canada, a country with a 25% Trump-imposed tariff. At Harvard, there were 751 students enrolled in 2024 — a much smaller percentage. So even in the brave new tariff world, the NHL is a larger threat to the trade imbalance than the Canadian students at Harvard.
As fate would have it, the University of Toronto has come to the rescue by agreeing to enroll Harvard students whose U.S. visas are in limbo.
Such largesse is certainly manifest even in foreign hockey players. They have typically grown up with universal health care, gun laws and a political system free of Fox News. When they arrive in our country, they are shocked by the wealth disparity and high crime rate.
Some choose to help. Sweden’s Henrik Lundqvist, the hockey Hall of Fame inductee known for his long career with the New York Rangers, focuses on underprivileged children through his own foundation and partnership with the Garden of Dreams Foundation. In the current political climate, with deep cuts to U.S. Agency for International Development and Medicaid, Lundqvist’s generosity is, unfortunately, distinctly un-American. Republican Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst's inhumane justification for cutting Medicaid — "we are all going to die" — doesn’t resonate with Swedes and other Europeans, as they did not grow up with such grotesque callousness.
Hockey players who view themselves as agents of change aren’t buying what Ernst is selling. Students attending universities, where the currency is critical thought, aren’t buying it either. If neither group is in step with the administration, perhaps foreign hockey players should be subject to a travel ban too. Then, perhaps we would be right where Vance wants us to be: an all-American hockey league.
Such twisted dreams aside, the NHL historically has had very few Americans. In the 1970s, only 2% of the league's players were U.S.-born. What changed the league forever then was the steady influx of European players — Sweden’s Börje Salming was a key standout in the 1973 draft. Though he took a beating, he did not compromise his silky smooth puck-handling skills for the "dump and run" game that was rampant. He moved like a smooth stream amid jagged rocks. Modern players such as Connor McDavid have mastered Salming’s weaving through defenders and then turning on the jets once he crosses the blue line, puck in tow. McDavid's teammate on the Edmonton Oilers, German-born Leon Draisaitl, is cut out of the same Phoenician ribbon.
Indeed, there is much to be learned from the transformation of hockey to the skill-dominated game it has become entirely because of the European influence.
Everyone gets better when they are exposed to the best. Ditto for education, and precisely why American universities are on top. Education is indeed a distinctly American export. In the process of acquiring a degree, foreign students engage in research, oftentimes resulting in a startup. Sergey Brin, who came to the U.S. in 1999 from Moscow to study at Stanford, ended up co-founding Google.
The Trump administration wants to end having the best minds in academic spaces, a move which is divisive and would only make America worse. No one benefits. Perhaps Trump and Vance should watch hockey and marvel at the modern game played by magicians on ice, most of whom have no roots in the U.S.
Or they just might reflect on their Google browser and wonder from where it ascended or on the little-known fact that 25% of all billion-dollar startups — yielding thousands of jobs — are founded by former international students.
Maybe then, they might realize that foreigners seeking education are just like the talented hockey players who make the game better.
Philip Phillips is a professor of physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His family immigrated to Boston from Trinidad and Tobago in 1968, the height of the Montreal Canadiens/Boston Bruins rivalry.
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