Sports and Civic Engagement

To what degree can athletes use their visibility to strengthen communities?

Immigrants are a growing share of professional sports in the US.

Today, approximately 14% of the U.S. population is foreign-born, and that share has been growing. However, in many professional sports immigrants are represented to a far greater extent. For example, in 2025, more than half of players in the National Hockey League (69%), Major League Soccer (57%), and Major League Cricket (53%) were foreign-born or immigrant athletes. Additionally, more than one-quarter of players in Minor League Baseball (38%) and the National Women's Soccer League (31%) were born abroad followed by Major League Baseball (24%), and the Women's National Basketball Association (21%).

Foreign-born athletes are among the very best in their sport.

For example, in 2023, both MLB MVP awards were presented to foreign-born players: Ronald Acuña Jr. who is from Venezuela and Shohei Ohtani who is from Japan. Shohei Ohtani also won the National League MVP in 2024. Similarly, for the past seven NBA seasons, foreign-born players were awarded the season MVP: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (2025), Nikola Jokić (2020-2021; 2021-2022; and 2023-2024), Joel Embiid (2022-2023), and Giannis Antetokounmpo (2018-2019; 2019-2020). Additionally, during the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, newly naturalized citizen Kaillie Humphries won gold for the United States in bobsledding, while immigrants Jay Litherland, Paul Chelimo, and Catarina Macario all won medals for TeamUSA in Tokyo in 2021. Read more about immigrants in sports.

The Sports and Civic Engagement Initiative

This initiative aims to study immigration and civic engagement in sports through original, data-driven research on the contributions of immigrants in professional and collegiate sports. We examine inclusion in two ways: 1) the degree to which immigrant athletes are represented in sports; and 2) how highlighting the stories and contributions of immigrant athletes can lead to greater understanding of immigrants generally.