By Steve Levy
I’m a big fan of the NBC show America’s Got Talent. Each year, magnificent singers, magicians, dancers, and other participants display their amazing talents for the viewing audience. The winner of this year’s competition was a young girl from Thailand who was an absolutely sensational rock singer and guitarist. She deserved to win. A close second was a fellow named Geno Ploeger, who was an awesome magician from the States.
But what caught our interest the most as we were watching the series is that such a large percentage of the acts on AGT were not American. Indeed, in the finals, five of the ten competitors were foreigners.
I guess there’s nothing wrong with that if you called it The World’s Got Talent. But this program is called America’s Got Talent. Would it be acceptable for Americans to apply for and win a talent competition in Thailand’s Got Talent?
This seems to be the new globalized trend. Last week, we wrote about former tennis pro Patrick McEnroe’s attempt to enact legislation that would limit the number of foreigners who can take coveted scholarship positions on our college sports teams. McEnroe noted that, of the 24 participants he saw in the latest NCAA tennis tournament finals, only three were Americans.
This is different than talented worldwide athletes joining professional teams in soccer or basketball. McEnroe’s point is about amateur college athletics. What’s happening is that our 18- and 19-year-old college students are now having to compete against 23-year-old professional Europeans, who are being recruited as freshmen in local universities. That means fewer scholarships and fewer opportunities for America’s youth.
I guess AGT is more analogous to a professional sports team and the amateurs in college sports, but there’s still something a little weird about opening up AGT to people from all over the world. If someone’s going to win America’s Got Talent, doesn’t it make sense that it should be an American?
Editor’s note: This article was written on September 24. The following day, we happened to come across a Facebook post by Felix Grucci Jr. that expressed remarkably similar sentiments. While our writings were created totally independently of each other, we couldn’t help but notice that we aren’t the only ones who feel this way. Here is the post from Mr. Grucci.