The U.S Team Is Building Something & Marching On

The Fourteenth Amendment was intended to right a wrong, not to beat Paraguay and Australia on the pitch—but then, American history is a long succession of accidents that lead to choices that, in retrospect, come to manifest as destiny. Here is one: when Florence Balogun, a Nigerian who lived in London, visited New York twenty-five years ago while heavily pregnant, airline staff refused to let her on the plane home, and so Folarin Balogun was born in Brooklyn. He was not even two months old when he went home to the United Kingdom—with American citizenship as his birthright.