I spent years running a post office and a printing house, and the first lesson both taught me is this: information, commerce, and talent flow only as freely as the gates allow. Shut a gate on no good cause, and you do not make yourself safer — you make yourself smaller.

Omar Artan earned his place at a World Cup — a credential awarded on demonstrable skill, vetted by an international body, before the eyes of the world. (The following is inference from the headline, not confirmed by a dossier.) He did not sneak toward opportunity; he was invited to it. To turn such a man away at the border is not a security measure. It is a statement about whose merit we are willing to recognize.

I have known what it is to be judged by origin rather than by conduct. I also know, with some shame I do not wish to paper over, that I was slow in my own life to extend that recognition to all people equally. I corrected course before I died, and I hold that correction as more instructive than the error. The lesson is not complicated: a person's worth is not located in his passport.

Now, I am cautious about the specifics of border law in an age I never lived through — visa regimes, security protocols, the machinery of modern immigration are beyond my direct knowledge, and I will not pretend otherwise. But the principle at stake is one any tradesman can weigh. When you refuse a skilled craftsman entry to your market for no cause connected to his craft, you hurt your market as much as you hurt him. The Somali people, it appears, understood this: they gave him the welcome his merit deserved.

A republic that wishes to lead the world in commerce, in sport, in ideas, must be a republic that talent wishes to enter. The postal roads I helped build were useful precisely because they were open — every printer, every farmer, every merchant could move goods and letters along them. Close a road to one class of traveler on grounds unrelated to conduct, and you have not secured the road; you have degraded it.

My counsel to the working person watching this from home is simple: take note of what your government says about you when it speaks through its gates as much as through its speeches. And if you have a voice in the matter — a vote, a letter to a representative, a conversation in your community — use it. The gate that bars the qualified stranger today is the gate that constrains your own freedom tomorrow.

A man who refuses to admit talent for the sake of fear has already conceded the argument to those he fears.