The U.S. embassy in Dakar recently rejected visa applications for several members of Senegal’s women’s basketball team. The team had been scheduled to train in the U.S. Senegal is also among the 36 nations that the United States is considering adding to a travel ban. These visa rejections were wrong, just as those travel bans would be wrong.

After the visa rejections, Senegal canceled what was to have been a 10-day training camp in the United States, in preparation for July’s Afrobasket 2025 tournament at Ivory Coast. AfroBasket 2025 serves as an Olympic qualifier for women’s basketball in Africa. The next summer Olympic Games will be in Los Angeles.

Culture — movies, books, music, food, sports — are how people in different countries communicate and connect with each other. That communication and those connections help keep the world not just civil and peaceful but fun: a place to experience and explore and enjoy.

The United States will host both the next FIFA World Cup and the next summer Olympic Games. The U.S. training camp for the Senegalese women’s basketball team was a stress test, not just of our ability but of our worthiness to host those games, a test not just of whether the United States is able to, but whether the United States should be allowed to host global sporting events. We failed that test.

We need to learn from this failure and correct our mistakes now, to avoid being humiliated on the global stage when the World Cup and the Olympics arrive.

William Middleton
Portland