This shouldn't be a surprise to you given the globalisation we have seen over the last fifty years. Even so the touring party of 1904 included two New Zealand born players.
Far more people find their jobs taking them overseas than ever before. Joe McCarthy and Marcus Smith were born in New York and Manila respectively presumably due to their parents' work. The concept of 'foreign born' isn't really a helpful one.
If you raise this particularly statistic out of concern for the number of players included due to residency qualification, I think you need to bear in mind that this is an inevitable result of professionalisation. I'm not entirely comfortable with it myself but it allows countries like Ireland and Scotland to be consistently competitive by enabling to fill gaps in their very limited player base. |