Migration retains a similar position as the concept of diaspora.  A migrant, as defined by the United Nations Organization of Migration (UN Migration, IOM) is:

as any person who is moving or has moved across an international border or within a State away from his/her habitual place of residence, regardless of: the person’s legal status, whether the movement is voluntary or involuntary, what the causes for the movement are, what the length of the stay is (2023).

The current political rhetoric surrounding the terms immigrant and migrant are cast in fixed biased agendas.  I argue that, as complicated individuals seeking to better our lives, faith, and belief value, we must look beyond the political biases and agendas prescribed to the terms immigrant and migrant.  To begin to critically understand our flexible positions in the global-local context, we need to see how the directions of our lives survive as migratory motions.  Being honest to how we can better our lives, our faith, and belief values, we need to scrutinize our implicit migration patterns.  Applying a critical lens to these patterns can provide us an insight into how we have/have not devalued our lives, core of faith, and belief value.  If we elect to rather hold onto external biased definitions of these terms – migrant and immigrant – then, we are destined to repeat old patterns of limitations that keep our growth stagnant.  The proverbial “ball is in our court” to either advance our perspectives or reside as a comfortably defeated individual.  Agency for change is not an easy step-by-step operation.  Stagnation is well-worn role without any action needed.  To expand our understanding that we participate in our life as both a migrant and an immigrant can, for some, be an uncomfortable realization.  Yet, it is this exact position of hesitation allowing outside elements to affect, effect, and direct our attentions, without our ethical conscious review of how these are applied to our lives, can leave us deprived of opportunities to improve our position in life, the view of ourselves, and cooperative interactions on all levels.  This potentially limited action firms the borders that physically and metaphorically quarantine our mind, body, and spirit.

The term immigrant, I argue, with a focused liberating perspective, can generate a release in the archetype areas of our life – mental, physical, and spiritual.  Casting away prescribed biased definitions employed by socio-political economic structures, we find a useful dialectic tool that lay dormant awaiting our embrace.  By participating actively as an immigrant, we learn to endure and surpass physical and conscious self-imposed borders.  These liminal points change into steps toward a productive layer of self-liberating agency.  We become immigrants even within our own spheres of global-local interactions.  We migrate across the digital divide each time we encounter technology.  We migrate across philosophical roadblocks each time we tackle a thought experiment and experience.  We migrate across intercultural exchanges, relationships, and beliefs.  Daily diasporas are unstable, in company with the complexities of our actions and thoughts as an immigrant (release from a defined space-place-time forced upon us for a false identity formation) and migrant (release from an arrived space-place-time to expand a construction of identity).  This critical discourse provides influenced opportunities for each to reevaluate the trajectory of our indeterminate lives.  Movement, albeit determinate or indeterminate, states that our positions and actions follow a diaspora.  The context, content and meaning of these diasporic trajectories qualifies that we become immigrants/migrants (read: im/migrant) through the repeated intersections of a linear temporal landscape coded by global-local phenomenological spheres of influence that sculpt our mental, physical, spiritual perspectives.  Binding together the provided analysis of diaspora and im/migrant hermeneutics we can begin to shift core factors in our life with the intent to advance these factors toward self-well-being and a firming of faith and belief.

We are all im/migrants to one extent or another.  Hein de Haas points to the aspirations-capabilities that frame the necessity for im/migrant movement (2021).  Following Haas’ theory of migration, we can surmise that the movement within our days are either “instrumental” (seeking a means-to-an-end) or “intrinsic” (directly affect our assumptions or realities of wellbeing) (2021).  Capturing this agency, we can see how Haas has been able to pave a useful trajectory for our daily movement – our lived diasporas as im/migrants in both a virtual and physical global-local environment.  This

framework helps [us] to understand the complex and often counter-intuitive ways in which processes of social transformation and ‘development’ shape patterns of [im/]migration and enable us to integrate the analysis of almost all forms of [im/]migratory mobility within one meta-conceptual framework. (Haas 2021)

We all migrate through our lives.  We each traverse across our own designated borders.  We endure some length of stay – minor, lengthy, or even permanent – at various points throughout our lives.  These inescapable elements align us as an im/migrant.

We are all active within a diasporic trajectory.  Haas (2008, 2010) denotes four points that speak toward the activity of our im/migrant diasporic attraction; 1. Direction (global-local physical positions), 2. Volume (length of time), 3. Composition (personal attention and attitude), and 4. Timing (temporal realization).