It was a perfect summer afternoon last Sunday as I strolled along the streets of Astoria and Jackson Heights, Queens. It felt as if I had traveled around the world without ever boarding a plane.

Walk a few blocks in Jackson Heights and you’ll hear Spanish, Bengali, Nepali, Tibetan, and Arabic blending into a soundtrack that belongs nowhere else. Turn a corner and you might find an Ecuadorian bakery next to a Colombian restaurant, a Pakistani grocery store across from a Mexican taqueria, and a soccer field where children whose parents come from four continents are chasing the same ball.

For decades, Queens has been one of the greatest immigrant experiments in human history. It is not perfect. No place is. But it remains a living rebuke to the forces that seek to divide people by race, nationality, religion, or language. In a world increasingly obsessed with building walls, Queens continues to build tables.

And every four years, during the FIFA World Cup, that spirit becomes impossible to miss.

As I was walking through Astoria and Jackson Heights, the excitement was palpable. Restaurant windows were draped in national colors. Jerseys hung from storefronts. Flags fluttered from apartment windows. Bars advertised watch parties that would begin in early afternoon and end long after sunset. The tournament had not yet fully begun, yet anticipation crackled through the neighborhood like electricity before a thunderstorm.

For immigrants, the World Cup is more than a sporting event. It is a reunion. It is memory. It is identity.

It is one of the rare moments when people are encouraged not to leave their old selves behind, but to celebrate where they came from. For one month, immigrants carry their homeland proudly into public view. The World Cup allows people to be fully American and fully something else at the same time.

Turning the foreign into the familiar

That may be the tournament’s greatest achievement. At a moment when political rhetoric often pressures immigrants to assimilate, shrink themselves, or prove their loyalty, the World Cup celebrates the very thing that makes immigrant communities unique. It transforms difference from a liability into an asset. The tournament becomes a giant mirror in which people see themselves reflected, not as outsiders, but as part of a global community.

I know that feeling of longing and loyalty well. I spent the first ten years of my life in Haiti, a country where soccer is woven into the very fabric of daily life. Businesses would close early for important matches. Streets emptied when major tournaments were underway. Victories became national celebrations; defeats felt like collective heartbreak.

Then, I immigrated to the United States in the early 1970s and discovered a very different sporting culture. America loved baseball. It worshipped football. It embraced basketball.

Soccer was an afterthought.

Back then, it was a sport played almost exclusively on the margins — in the dusty public parks and vacant lots of New York by people who, like the game itself, were politely tolerated but rarely taken seriously by mainstream culture.

But history has a funny way of changing course. As waves of immigrants continued arriving from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, we brought our traditions with us. We brought our food, our music, our languages, and our faiths.

And we brought soccer.

Slowly at first, then all at once, the sport began to grow. What was once viewed as foreign became familiar. By the time the United States hosted the World Cup in 1994, a window had been thrown wide open, allowing the global game to rush inside. Today, the transformation is undeniable. Children across the country wear the jerseys of Lionel Messi or Kylian Mbappé with the same enthusiasm previous generations reserved for Joe Montana or Derek Jeter.

A language that requires no translation

America did not simply adopt soccer. Soccer helped America become more itself. The game flourished because it reflected the changing face of the nation. And nowhere is that reality more visible than Queens.

If the United Nations is diplomacy conducted by governments, Queens is diplomacy conducted by neighbors. The United Nations sits along the East River with delegates representing nations; Queens sits a few miles away on the other bank of the river, with ordinary people living in those nations every day.

The World Cup turns those everyday interactions into a global festival. It reminds us that identity is not a zero-sum game. Someone can love America and still cheer passionately for Jamaica, Mexico, Haiti, Ghana, or Ecuador. Pride in one place does not diminish love for another. In fact, it often deepens it.

The World Cup succeeds because it speaks a language that requires no translation. Long before people understand one another’s politics, they understand joy. They understand hope. They understand disappointment. They understand what it feels like to dream together.

For all its flaws, soccer has often done more to foster understanding between ordinary people than many formal institutions ever could. A goal scored in the final minutes can unite strangers more quickly than a diplomatic summit. A shared celebration can dissolve barriers that years of political debate leave untouched.

That is the quiet power of the World Cup. It reminds us that our differences are real, but so is our common humanity. And perhaps nowhere in America is that lesson more visible than in Queens, where the world gathers not every four years, but every single day.

The World Cup merely gives the rest of us a chance to notice.

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Garry Pierre-Pierre is the founder and former publisher of The Haitian Times. He’s a former reporter for The New York Times where he was part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s reporting of the World Trade Center bombings in 1993.