Moving as Sovereignty: How Migrant and Immigrant Communities Build Themselves — and What Policy Does to Their Power

COMMUNITY POWER · SOCIAL JUSTICE

Human beings have always moved. For most of human history — before the passport, before the visa, before the border wall — migration was simply life: following water, following seasons, following kin, following opportunity. The peoples of what are now called Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe walked across every continent thousands of years before any nation-state existed to restrict that movement. Migration is not a problem to be managed. It is one of the oldest expressions of human sovereignty — people deciding, collectively and individually, where they need to be.

Today, 51.8 million immigrants lived in the United States in 2023, and by January 2025 the count had reached 53.3 million, the largest ever recorded. Immigrants and their U.S.-born children number about 90.8 million people — 27 percent of the civilian noninstitutionalized U.S. population in 2023. These are not people receiving charity. They are people exercising the same sovereignty over their movement that humans have exercised since we first walked out of Africa. The spirit of mutual belonging that makes this possible is precisely what the science of belonging through music and ritual shows is essential for human health and community resilience.

Why People Move: Sovereignty, Survival, and the Right to a Future

Migration is driven by the full range of human motivation: safety, family, economic possibility, political freedom, educational access, and the deeply human desire to build a better life for the next generation. As of mid-2023, more than 11 million U.S. residents were born in Mexico, about 22% of all immigrants — a migration pattern inseparable from NAFTA’s destruction of Mexican agricultural communities, the drug war’s displacement of millions, and a century of U.S. intervention in Latin American political economies. People do not leave home because home is not worth staying for. They leave because political and economic forces — many of them generated by the very country they are moving to — made staying impossible. Understanding migration requires understanding what produced it. For many, the legal pathway begins with knowing how to navigate the U.S. visa process — a system that is itself a reflection of which countries and which bodies the U.S. deems worthy of welcome.

What Immigrant Communities Build

The economic data is unambiguous: in 2023, about 33 million immigrants were part of the U.S. workforce, including about 23 million lawful immigrants. The median household income for immigrants in 2022 was approximately $75,500 — slightly higher than that of U.S.-born households at $74,600. Immigrant-owned businesses create jobs, introduce new products and services, and strengthen local economies. Immigrants are already playing a vital role filling healthcare workforce gaps — a fact that becomes visceral in communities where immigrant nurses, doctors, and home health aides are the difference between people receiving care and going without. The 2023 Map the Impact Report documents these contributions across all 50 states. The story is not one of immigrants receiving from America. It is one of immigrants building it, sector by sector, generation by generation.

What Policy Does to Moving Bodies

Immigration policy in the United States has never been neutral. It has historically been designed to determine which bodies are allowed to move freely and which are criminalized for doing what humans have always done. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The bracero program that imported Mexican labor and expelled it when no longer convenient. Mass deportation operations that separate families, disrupt communities, and generate trauma across generations. The asylum system’s bottlenecks that leave people in legal limbo for years. These are not administrative inefficiencies. They are the architecture of a system that benefits from immigrant labor while denying immigrant belonging. Supportive policies — housing assistance, job placement, legal pathways, language access — are not charity extended to grateful recipients. They are partial correction for structural harms, and they benefit entire communities, not just those newly arrived.

Cultural Sovereignty and Shared Humanity

The cultural contributions of immigrant and migrant communities are not footnotes to American life — they are central chapters. In 2023, around a quarter of all immigrants (27%, or nearly 14 million people) were born in Asia, bringing linguistic traditions, culinary knowledge, artistic forms, and spiritual practices that have reshaped every city they have entered. African immigrant communities have brought Ubuntu philosophy, communal caregiving traditions, and diasporic knowledge that links American Black communities back to the continent. Latin American communities have sustained Indigenous languages, healing traditions, and family structures that outlasted colonial attempts to erase them. This is not diversity as decoration. It is cultural sovereignty — communities insisting on remaining who they are, even in motion.

Ubuntu and the Ethics of Welcome

Ubuntu — I am because we are — does not ask whether the person arriving is worthy of belonging. It begins from the premise that belonging is constitutive of humanity itself. Every migrant who builds a new life is practicing Ubuntu: drawing on the strength of community to survive, and contributing that strength back so the community grows. The question is not whether to welcome people who move. The question is whether the society they move into is willing to be transformed by them — to become more fully human through the encounter. That transformation is what Ubuntu promises, and what exclusionary immigration policy refuses.

If someone in your life has been told they must earn their belonging, share this with them — and with the neighbors who are still learning to welcome.

I Am Because We Are. And Together, We Heal.