The US border runs straight through the World Cup

On June 11, the FIFA World Cup 2026 kicked off in Mexico, which, along with the United States and Canada, is cohosting this year’s tournament in an ostensible display of continental unity.

From the get-go, the whole shared hosting concept was rather ludicrous, given that one of the hosts is particularly bad at playing with others. For starters, the US maintains a system of overzealous visa restrictions and “travel bans” for citizens of an array of nations, which renders an already socioeconomically exclusive event even more so and shatters the illusion of international camaraderie that the World Cup is supposed to embody.

The US also presides over an insanely militarised frontier with cohost Mexico, a country US commander-in-chief Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to bomb and invade. In other unsportsmanlike behaviour, Trump has referred to Mexicans as criminals, drug dealers and rapists; in 2019, The New York Times reported his suggestion that US soldiers shoot migrants and that an alligator-filled moat be installed along the border.

Upon reassuming office last year, Trump in effect closed the US border to asylum seekers and economic refugees, a charming move, seeing as the US is responsible for much of the global upheaval that forces folks to migrate in the first place.

A young man I know from the violence-racked Mexican state of Michoacan recently found himself obliged to pay $10,000 to a coyote, or migrant smuggler, to have himself hoisted by rope over the border fence into the US, once life at home no longer appeared financially or physically sustainable.

In other words, while some inhabitants of the globe are dropping $10,000 or more on World Cup tickets, this young man had to scrape together the same funds for a shot at fleeing a US-fuelled panorama of poverty and bloodshed in Mexico.

For its part, Mexico’s decision to cohost an abominably expensive tournament – rather than devote such vast resources to, say, tracking down the country’s more than 134,000 disappeared persons – has been seen as a slap in the face by many Mexicans. Most of the disappearances took place following the US-backed launch of the so-called “war on drugs” in 2006, which has amounted to a war on the poor.

The massive deployment around World Cup venues of Mexican security forces, notorious for human rights abuses and other repression, has also rubbed many people the wrong way.