The world’s 280 million immigrants have greater shares of Christians, Muslims and Jews than the overall population, in keeping with a recent Pew Research Center study released on Monday.
“You see migrants coming to places just like the U.S., Canada, different places through Western Europe, and being more religious — and sometimes more Christian specifically — than the native-born people in those countries,” said Stephanie Kramer, the study’s lead researcher.
While Christians make up about 30% of the world’s population, the world’s migrants are 47% Christian, in keeping with the most recent data collected in 2020. The study found that Muslims make up 29% of the migrant population but 25% of the world’s population. Jews, only 0.2% of the world’s population but 1% of migrants, are by far the almost definitely religious group to have migrated, with 20% of Jews worldwide living outside their country of birth in comparison with just 6% of Christians and 4% of Muslims.
Four percent of migrants are Buddhist, matching the overall population, and 5% are Hindu, in comparison with 15% of the world population.
Over the past 30 years, migration has outpaced global population growth by 83%, in keeping 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. U.S. migrants are way more prone to have a spiritual identity than the American-born population normally.
The influx of spiritual migrants can have a major impact on the religious composition of their destination countries. In the case of the U.S., “immigrants are form of putting the brakes on secularization,” Kramer said.
While about 30% of people within the U.S. overall discover as atheist, agnostic or religiously unaffiliated, only 10% of migrants to the U.S. 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, slightly than “flows,” numbers measured over a selected time. This methodology allowed them to check all adults and youngsters who live outside their countries of birth, no matter after they immigrated.
“We’re not only inquisitive 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 accrued over time.”
The study found that migrants ceaselessly move to countries where their religious identity is already represented and prevalent. For example, Israel is the highest destination for Jews, with 51% of Jewish migrants (1.5 million) residing there, while Saudi Arabia is the highest destination for Muslims, with 13% (10.8 million) residing in the world. Christians and religiously unaffiliated migrants share the U.S., Germany and Russia as their top three destinations.
The majority of the world’s Christian migrants originate from Mexico and settle within the U.S., Pew found. They are typically in search of jobs, improved safety or to reunite with members of the family. Meanwhile, 10% 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 fitting 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, similar to 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, nonetheless, 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.
“Plenty of people have asked for an update to it, and we get a variety of 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 just like the 2012 study, and Kramer found the outcomes relatively unsurprising.
“Even in that older data, you may see that religious minorities were so way more prone to leave their country of origin and migrate to a rustic where their religious identity was more prevalent,” she said.
© Religion News Service
