If there’s an unclaimed frontier anywhere that is prime for rugby league’s warm embrace, that place is Las Vegas, Nevada. The world’s original Sin City is rugby league heartland. It just doesn’t know it yet.

There is an early problem, though – the US isn’t an easy country into which to secure free passage. And a number of NRL players representing the four clubs playing at Allegiant Stadium on March 3 have previously had brushes with the law.

Things must be sorted as best they can before anyone gets on a plane. Actually, it should’ve been sorted out months ago, because even players who’ve been charged with some crimes and successfully defended themselves might have to explain themselves to US Immigration.

Whether the laws of the US are right or wrong doesn’t matter. Like any other jurisdiction, the country is entitled to establish and enforce its own laws and regulations governing who’s granted entry rights into the country.

Section 212(2) of the US’s Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 is a useful starting point. Generally speaking, a foreign national who has committed a crime involving “moral turpitude” is “inadmissible” into the US.

The same section of the same legislation says foreign nationals who violate the laws of the US or anywhere else in relation to any “controlled substance” can’t get in, even though the country has a litany of its own uncontrolled problems with controlled substances, such as cocaine.

Elvis has entered the building… but can NRL stars follow?Credit: Simon Letch

So what is meant by the term “moral turpitude”? Under US law it is a crime in which the conduct of the convicted “shocks the public conscience as being inherently base, vile or depraved, contrary to the rules of morality and the duties owed between man and man, either one’s fellow man or society in general”.

Not all crimes include elements of moral turpitude. Otherwise, there’d be no point in setting the threshold in the first place. But crimes that involve intentional harm or threat of harm to another person – including murder, manslaughter, sexual assault, serious assault, kidnapping, robbery and domestic violence – traverse the line. But the dividing line is fuzzy.