Monday night's NCAA men's basketball final will attract millions of viewers. One player on Duke's team — Sean Obi — hails from Nigeria. He's not the only African player who has enjoyed a successful hoops career in the U.S. The most famous is Nigerian Hakeem Olajuwon, who starred at the University of Houston before going on to a Hall of Fame career with the Houston Rockets and the Toronto Raptors.
But not every African student who comes to the United States to play basketball has a positive experience. In the April issue of Harper's and over at WNYC, I reported on the story of four promising teenage Nigerian basketball players who were lured to the United States with the promise of college scholarships, but ended up with one homeless in New York City and the other three in foster care in Michigan.
And last month, the Department of Homeland Security raided the Faith Baptist Christian Academy South in Ludowici, Ga., and discovered 30 young boys, mostly Dominican, who had been living in the campus gym, sleeping on the floor. Apparently students had been housed there since 2013. These boys also had been recruited to America with the promise of a high school education and a shot at a college scholarship.
[For more of this story, written by Alexandra Starr, go to http://www.npr.org/blogs/codes...e-basketball-players]
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