Irrelevant, but Boston just hired former Royals' GM Allard Baird to be their new assistant general manager.

Not sure how I feel about it...anyone have any insight about the guy?

I think this is actually a sound thing to do if you think about it, David. We do (and should) allow defectors and refugees from Cuba if they flee under their own power and make it here to U.S. territory, but it is proper to prosecute anyone who works as a smuggler of human capital, regardless of the specific circumstances. Understand that the law isn't going to make an exception in this case because the people being smuggled are baseball players (though I wouldn't mind if it did!), it's going to go after such "agents" because it would be a bad idea to encourage coyotes for all sorts of policy reasons.

Leaving aside questions of national security, or of the practical difficulty in differentiating (allowed) Cubans from other (disallowed) Latin American illegals - a smuggler could be reliably counted upon to misrepresent such things were it ever to his advantage to do so - it would likely cause misery for the poor Cuban refugees themselves. Imagine how quickly many of them would fall prey to unscrupulous or phony "agents," as often currently happens with illegals making border crossings from Mexico...a bad scene all around.

It's precisely for this reason that, while we will allow any Cuban who reaches our shores to claim asylum, we don't want to encourage third parties to commodify such emigrations. Hopefully Fidel will go to his richly-deserved death soon enough, and this will cease to be an issue.

Perhaps you were just making a wisecrack, I dunno - my sarcasm detector is notoriously weak.

As is your affected writing style.

Jeff B, I understand your point. However, I guess I see these people as more akin to the underground railroad, illegal, but morally correct. The difference here is these agents were out to make a profit, rather than just help people escape.

I work for an international healthcare staffing firm and we immigrate asian healthcare professionals from third world countries to the US, for profit. The social-work feel that comes with the work can supplement my income. But from a corporate standpoint, management doesn't care what happens to our immigrants, even though they sign 2 yr contracts with us. We take care of them to the extent we can afford to - an ethical question I'm not going to get into - but really, it's about profit. Immigrants, however, need my company's help to ensure they receive their green card, establish credit, etc, which we don't have time for. So it ends up being an unfair relationship UNLESS the staffing firm can afford to deal with the immigrant's personal & professionals needs. I'm going to assume this agent cannot afford proper treatment of exiles, in which case... is he putting these Cubans under contract?

Blah blah blah - sorry. I just wanted to share some insight on the complications being overlooked... You can't just throw a dog a bone.

How many agencies do this legally? Any? It seems absurdly lucrative...

So we should encourage people to leave Cuba, but send 'em all back to Mexico. Okay.

Viva Fidel!

That's not my position at all. My feeling is that anyone who wants to come to the US should be able to do so easily.