Amid intensifying industry debate over whether college athletes are employees of their universities, there's one group that is hardly discussed – international college athletes.
Ongoing proceedings in the courts and with two National Labor Relations Board cases could in time result in at least some college athletes being formally designated as university employees, which would radically reshape the college sports paradigm.
Award-winning immigration attorney Ksenia Maiorova, who co-authored a book titled NIL X Immigration with attorney Amy Maldonado, believes that the potential employee model would have a dramatic impact on international student-athletes.
"If these efforts
by Dartmouth [men's basketball players] or some other organizations are successful, we will have potentially a situation where – if student-athletes are designated as employees – overnight we could have any number of international student-athletes that are immediately in violation of their [F-1 student] status," Maiorova, also known as "The Sports Visa Lawyer," told On3.
"We've got 20,000-plus international student-athletes in the NCAA. If they're all deemed employees, then they are in violation of their student status immediately, with no recourse because they can't be employees."
United States immigration regulations prohibit international students in the U.S. on F-1 student visas from participating in employment. F-1 visas provide for only limited employment authorization types, most of which must be connected to the degree the athletes pursue.
As a result, it has been exceedingly difficult for international athletes – about 12% of Division I athletes are international – to legally partake in NIL in the U.S. Typical NIL opportunities require an athlete to perform a service for compensation, which conflicts with immigration policy.
There are opportunities for them to monetize their brands outside U.S. borders, as former Kentucky men's basketball standout Oscar Tshiebwe demonstrated when he made a reported $500,000 during a preseason trip to the Bahamas in August 2022.
If college sports ultimately usher in an employment model, the impact on international athletes would be so significant and far-reaching that Maiorova believes the U.S. Department of Homeland Security would no longer be able to ignore it.
"They'll have no choice but to take their heads out of the sand and actually consider how we change this," she said.
As the college athletics industry continues to assess the consequences of a potential employment model, Maiorova said, she has yet to have a conversation with an institution that has considered the implications of the model from an immigration perspective.
"To the extent that I've brought it up to various stakeholders, that's just been kind of a novel concept for them – they just go, 'Oh, well, we haven't thought about that,'" she said. "I don't get the sense that a lot of institutions are aware of the immigration implications of this." – Eric Prisbell
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