The world’s 280 million immigrants have greater shares of Christians, Muslims, and Jews than the final population, in line with a latest Pew Research Center study released Monday.
“You see migrants coming to places just like the US, Canada, different places through Western Europe, and being more religious—and sometimes more Christian particularly—than the native-born people in those countries,” said Stephanie Kramer, the study’s lead researcher.
While Christians make up about 30 percent of the world’s population, the world’s migrants are 47 percent Christian, in line with the most recent data collected in 2020.
The study found that Muslims make up 29 percent of the migrant population but 25 percent of the world’s population.
Jews, only 0.2 percent of the world’s population but 1 percent of migrants, are by far the most probably religious group to have migrated, with 20 percent of Jews worldwide living outside their country of birth in comparison with just 6 percent of Christians and 4 percent of Muslims.
Four percent of migrants are Buddhist, matching the final population, and 5 percent are Hindu, in comparison with 15 percent of the world population.
Over the past 30 years, migration has outpaced global population growth by 83 percent, in line with Pew.
Though people immigrate for a lot of reasons, including economic opportunity, to reunite with family, and to flee violence or persecution, religion and migration are sometimes closely connected, the report finds. US migrants are rather more more likely to have a spiritual identity than the American-born population generally.
The influx of non secular migrants can have a big impact on the religious composition of their destination countries. In the case of the US, “immigrants are form of putting the brakes on secularization,” Kramer said.
While about 30 percent of people within the US overall discover as atheist, agnostic, or religiously unaffiliated, only 10 percent of migrants to the US discover with those categories.
Pew studied data from 270 censuses and surveys, estimating the religious composition of migrants from 95,696 mixtures of 232 origin and destination countries and territories.
Their evaluation focused on the “stock,” the full number of individuals residing as international migrants, relatively than “flows,” numbers measured over a selected time. This methodology allowed them to check all adults and kids who live outside their countries of birth, no matter after they immigrated.
“We’re not only fascinated about the religious composition of people that arrived in a destination country within the last 12 months or within the last five years,” explained Kramer. According to the report, measuring the full “stock” of migrants reflects slower changes, “patterns which have collected over time.”
The study found that migrants continuously move to countries where their religious identity is already represented and prevalent. For example, Israel is the highest destination for Jews, with 51 percent of Jewish migrants (1.5 million) residing there, while Saudi Arabia is the highest destination for Muslims, with 13 percent (10.8 million) residing in the world.
Christians and religiously unaffiliated migrants share the US, Germany, and Russia as their top three destinations.
The majority of the world’s Christian migrants originate from Mexico and settle within the US, Pew found. They are typically searching for jobs, improved safety, or to reunite with members of the family. Meanwhile, 10 percent of the world’s Muslim migrants (8.1 million) were born in Syria, fleeing regional conflict after a war broke out in 2011.
The report attributes high rates of Jewish migration partly to Israel’s Law of Return, which grants Jews the suitable to receive automatic citizenship and make aliyah, a move to Israel.
As of 2020, about 1.5 million Jews born outside of Israel now live inside the country’s borders. Jewish migrants to Israel often come from former Soviet republics, resembling Ukraine (170,000) and Russia (150,000). The United States has the second highest population of Jewish migrants (400,000), with 1 / 4 moving from Israel.
Across the board, nevertheless, Kramer said that immigration levels across religious groups have remained fairly stable over time. Despite consistent numbers, she advocated for doing this study due to the popularity of a 2012 Pew report, Faith on the Move. The two studies used different methodologies, and Kramer described Faith on the Move as a “snapshot” of faith and immigration in 2010.
“Loads of people have asked for an update to it, and we get numerous questions related to religion and migration,” she said. Despite demand for the info, “Faith on the Move was really the last report we put out that focused on this.”
Many of the findings in the brand new report are much like the 2012 study, and Kramer found the outcomes relatively unsurprising.
“Even in that older data, you may see that religious minorities were so rather more more likely to leave their country of origin and migrate to a rustic where their religious identity was more prevalent,” she said.
