Immigration and Soccer

Chapter 2 includes a discussion of how soccer players (football players to Europeans) move across countries in response to differences in tax rates. The New York Times Upshot column ran an article related to this on April 1, 2015. No April Fools joke here: There are proposals to restrict the number of foreigners playing soccer in Britain. As the article discusses, allowing foreigners to play soccer on British teams has raised the quality of soccer there--but the same is true in other countries as well. As British teams have struggled in international competition in recent years, backlash against foreign players has grown. But would reducing the number of foreign players improve British teams' chances? That's not an economic question, but it seems unlikely the answer would be yes.