Religion and Immigration E-Book

Peter Kivisto

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: PIMS - Polity Immigration and Society series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 369

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

This concise book provides readers with a comprehensive overview and critical assessment of the key issues and varied strands of research relating to immigration and religion that have been produced during the past two decades.

Religion, once a neglected topic in migration studies, is today seen as a crucially important aspect of the immigrant experience. For some - particularly those focusing on religion in North America - religion has been portrayed as a vital resource for many immigrants engaged in the essential identity work required in adjusting to the receiving society. For others - particularly those who have focused on Muslim immigrants in Western Europe - religion tends to be depicted as a source of conflict rather than one of comfort and consolation. 

In a judicious, engaging, and highly readable account, this book sorts through these contrasting viewpoints, pointing to an approach that will assist upper-level students and scholars alike in putting these competing analyses into perspective. 

Leseprobe

Religion and Immigration

Immigration & Society series

Carl L. Bankston III, Immigrant Networks and Social Capital

Thomas Faist, Margit Fauser & Eveline Reisenauer,Transnational Migration

Christian Joppke, Citizenship and Immigration

Grace Kao, Elizabeth Vaquera & Kimberly Goyette, Education and Immigration

Nazli Kibria, Cara Bowman & Megan O’Leary, Race and Immigration

Ronald L. Mize & Grace Peña Delgado, Latino Immigrants in the United States

Philip Q. Yang, Asian Immigration to the United States

Religion and Immigration

Migrant Faiths in North America and Western Europe

Peter Kivisto

polity

Copyright © Peter Kivisto 2014

The right of Peter Kivisto to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2014 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8666-0

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

Dedicated to the memory of Robert W. Nagle 1955–2014

Contents

Acknowledgments

1  Introduction: Religion on the Move

2  Immigrant Identity Work and Religion

3  Reframing Religious Organizations and Practices

4  Immigrants and Transnational Religious Networks

5  Church–State Relations and the Public Sphere

6  Epilogue

References

Index

Acknowledgments

The idea for this book originated in a conversation I had with Emma Longstaff in Montreal at the time she set out to launch the Immigration and Society series. I owe her a debt of gratitude for looking to me to write this particular volume for the series. In what is my first experience of publishing with Polity, I would like to extend my thanks to everyone I came into contact with, for in all instances they were a pleasure to work with. One person in particular deserves special recognition: Jonathan Skerrett. Although this is a relatively short book, it was a long time coming and during that time Jonathan proved to be the embodiment of patience, again and again revealing a remarkable capacity to remain (at least from my vantage) calm while waiting for the manuscript to land finally on his doorstep. He did gently nudge me along at various points, always expressing his continued support. I hope that he is pleased with the end result.

A number of people have helped me think through and frame the issues addressed herein, some very directly and others in a somewhat more indirect way. I would like to extend heartfelt thanks to Jeffrey C. Alexander, Paolo Boggani, Kevin Christiano, Phillip Connor, Thomas Faist, Margit Fauser, Nancy Foner, Inger Furseth, Doug Hartmann, Auvo Kostiainen, Peter Kraus, Feith Mansouri, Vince Marotta, Vanja La Vecchia-Mikkola, Peggy Levitt, Leo Lucassen, Tariq Modood, Tuomas Martikainen, Peter Marty, Ewa Morawska, Rubén Rumbaut, Pasi Saukkonen, Giuseppe Sciortino, Bill Swatos, Mari Toivanen, Östen Wahlbeck, R. Stephen Warner, and Rhys Williams.

For a different form of help, I would like to thank my children, Sarah and Aaron, and their respective partners, Bob and Katie. And, finally, there is one other person who knows something about patience, not to mention love and nurture: my wife Susan. I hope she enjoys this latest addition to our bookshelf.

1

Introduction: Religion on the Move

The Brick Lane Jamme Masjid is located in London’s East End on the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street. A fifteen-minute walk from Liverpool Street Station, the mosque serves the large Bangladeshi population that began to flock into the surrounding neighborhood in the 1970s. The world these immigrants have created in this urban enclave was vividly depicted in Monica Ali’s acclaimed and controversial novel, Brick Lane (2003). The listed Georgian building officially opened as a mosque in 1976 and since then a number of improvements to the interior and exterior of the building have been completed, including the construction of what has been described as a minaret-like public sculpture, a 90-foot-high, brightly lit stainless steel tower.

Reflecting the area’s long history of ethnic succession, Jamme Masjid represents the fourth distinct religious identity of the building. Originally built in 1743, La Neuve Eglise served as a chapel for Huguenot refugees who fled persecution in France and soon became the dominant group in the silk-weaving industry of Spitalfields. By the early nineteenth century, considerable assimilation had occurred, along with a movement out of the neighborhood for more affluent parts of London. Very quickly, Huguenots were replaced by Jews. In 1809, Wesleyans leased the building with the idea of having it serve as the institutional hub of the London Society for Promoting Christianity. This was an evangelical group founded by Joseph Fry, a Jewish-born convert to Christianity, which was devoted to missionary work within the Jewish community. This relatively short-lived and rather fruitless effort was abandoned in 1819, when the facility became a Methodist Church whose outreach work no longer extended to Jews. It remained a Methodist house of worship until 1897, when a group of Orthodox Jews from Lithuania known as the Mahzikei Hadas (Strengtheners of the Faith) purchased the property and established the Spitalfields Great Synagogue, modeled after the major synagogues of Eastern Europe. With the arrival of large numbers of Jews from Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century, the congregation grew and thrived, becoming one of the most important institutions serving the needs of the immigrant population in East London.

As with the Huguenots earlier, Jews over time gained an economic foothold in the London economy, permitting over the course of the twentieth century the entry of many into the middle class. With upward mobility came geographic mobility. By World War II, large numbers of Jews had exited East London for more affluent London environs, such as Golders Green in North London. Attendance at the Great Synagogue declined precipitously in the post-war era, forcing the board to close operations in 1952. Some decades later, the Machzikei Hadath Synagogue was built in Golders Green. Meanwhile as Bangladeshis moved into the Brick Lane area, a group from within that community arranged to purchase the property and thus began the fourth and current religious use of the structure 233 years after it had been built.

59 Brick Lane, the official address of the site, has thus been home to all three of what are increasingly referred to as the Abrahamic religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The first immigrants who were responsible for the building’s construction were refugees fleeing religious persecution. Such was also true of Eastern European Jews, though political and religious oppression were mixed with economic factors in contributing to this infusion of newcomers. Finally, the postcolonial migrants from Bangladesh were a much clearer instance of labor migrants. Meanwhile the presence of a Methodist chapel for much of the nineteenth century is a reminder that ethnic enclaves usually contain a far more heterogeneous population than is often appreciated, and this means that immigrants invariably confront not only fellow ethnics, but also both members of other immigrant groups and members of the native-born population.

Not only did the three immigrant groups arrive in East London for somewhat different reasons, but arriving as they did at different historical moments, they entered a host society that was subject to profound and ongoing transformations brought about by the impact over time of industry and empire (Hobsbawm 1968). The Huguenots arrived before the Industrial Revolution had mechanized the textile industry. As silk weavers, they were part of a craft tradition that was under assault by the forces of technological transformation, leading to considerable conflict. This immigrant group was involved in militant actions that led to the passage of the Spitalfield Act of 1765, which for a time made silk weaving a protected industry with regulated wages. As the classic histories of the English working class make clear, these actions were incapable of stopping the juggernaut of industrial capitalism (Thompson 1963; Hobsbawm 1964).

Jews entered East London after capitalism’s triumph and thus inhabited a different world of work. At the same time, they arrived when, beginning with the Chartist movement and extending to the creation of the Labour Party, the working class was acquiring a political voice and efforts were made to forge worker solidarity by overcoming ethnic divides within the ranks. This is not to overlook the fact that Jews confronted considerable anti-Semitic hostility during this time. That being said, the growing middle-class prosperity of the Jewish community over the course of the twentieth century took place during the creation and expansion of the British welfare state and the attempt to shape citizenship along the lines described by T.H. Marshall (1964) in which the status of citizenship and the three rights associated with it – civic, political, and social – in combination served to mitigate against the excessive inequality generated by an unbridled capitalism (see Kivisto and Faist 2007: 54–6 for a discussion of what Marshall refers to as “class abatement”).

Finally, by the time Bangladeshis arrived in London, somewhat after their Indian and Pakistani counterparts from the Indian subcontinent, the era of postcolonialism was well underway and deindustrialization had begun to take hold with a vengeance. Instead of jobs in the manufacturing sector serving as transmission belts for upward mobility, newcomers entering Britain with low levels of human capital found themselves at a distinct disadvantage in the labor market. Timing played a role, for the large influx of approximately 330,000 Bangladeshis arrived at precisely that point when the British economy reached its nadir. As the Winter of Discontent gave way to the economic restructuring defined by the neoliberal policies of the Thatcher government, a new postindustrial society emerged. By the turn of the century, Bangladeshis had the highest unemployment level of any group in the UK, at nearly 20 percent. Reflective of a changing economy, only 12 percent found employment in the manufacturing sector, while 55 percent found work in the hotel and restaurant sector – as Brick Lane become a major tourist destination, akin to Chinatown.

Nevertheless, just before the economic crisis of 2008, the Economist magazine (2007) reported that there were measurable improvements in educational achievement of the second generation and that a growing number of workers were entering skilled and professional occupations. At the same time, as with Jews, the new immigrants experienced the hostile reaction of the receiving society, which was shaped in terms of both racial and religious otherness. This occurred, however, in a somewhat different context than earlier in the twentieth century, for despite limitations, British society today is more amenable to multiculturalism than it was only a few decades ago (Kivisto 2002: 138–54; Modood 2005, 2010). This is not to deny the backlash or the temptation toward what Paul Gilroy (2006) has called “postcolonial melancholia.” Rather, it is to note that in the struggle over multiculturalism as a mode of incorporation, there are more proponents today than in the past (Alexander 2013).

From the eighteenth to the twenty-first century Brick Lane has experienced major economic changes. Its various immigrant populations have confronted different economic prospects and challenges, and with them an array of issues concerning their well-being such as housing conditions, health care, educational opportunities, and the prevalence of crime and other social problems in their environments. At the same time, they have had to deal with and confront obstacles that have prevented their political empowerment and stymied their efforts to become something other than second-class citizens. All of this takes place within social worlds shaped by gender, race, class, age, and generation. As anyone familiar with the already huge and ever-expanding literature on contemporary immigration to the developed nations can attest, social scientists have expended considerable time, energy, and resources addressing these issues. And increasingly, this has been done with an appreciation of the virtues of comparative analyses, be they comparisons between the past and present or between different contemporary contexts, or whether they are posed at the national or subnational level.

Brick Lane is, of course, a microcosm of a larger phenomenon. Although a paradigmatic example of neighborhoods characterized by the ethnic succession of ever-changing immigrant populations, one could find countless other examples from the cities of North America and Western Europe. Moreover, Brick Lane is a neighborhood located within the context of a larger urban conglomeration, which in turn is located in a region and ultimately a nation. Immigration research should of necessity concern itself with all of these levels, with an awareness of the dialectical relations between and among levels of analysis. Furthermore, as those who have advanced what has become known as a transnational optic have persuasively revealed, it is equally important to locate that which occurs within the containers of nation-states in terms of the larger parameters of transnational ties, networks, and fields (Glick Schiller 1997; Levitt and Jaworsky 2007).

For their part, the individuals who move across borders bring multiple aspects of their identities with them. Immigration studies concerned with the Great Migration to the United States between 1880 and 1924 have been particularly interested in the salience of ethnic identity as a factor contributing to the ease or difficulty of transition to a new environment. And reciprocally other studies have explored the varied reactions of the established residents of receiving societies to the presence of newcomers whose ethnic identities made them stand out from the larger national culture. Ultimately the two strands of research have in combination teased out the implications of the presence of newcomers in redefining what it means to be a member of a societal community. This has been a hallmark of scholarship from the Chicago School of Sociology to the work of social historians since the 1970s (Kivisto 1990). Although the significance of religion for these immigrants was not ignored, religion received considerably less attention than other aspects of ethnicity. This was particularly true of the major works produced by social historians, for a majority of them came to their topics from the vantage of class, race/ethnicity, and gender. Religion was not accorded anywhere near the same level of attention. A cursory examination of John Bodnar’s The Transplanted (1985), the major work devoted to offering a synthetic account of the body of scholarship produced by social historians and historical sociologists, reflects this relative lack of attention.

At the same time that this work was being produced, social scientists were turning their attention to the new migratory wave flowing into all of the developing nations. Building on a tradition of research defined by the preceding major migratory wave, the empirical foci of the work on contemporary immigrants paralleled that devoted to the previous epoch. From the 1970s forward, a vast and ever-expanding body of research has been produced. Taking stock in the early 1990s of the portion of that work that was devoted to religion, I concluded that although one could point to a number of significant contributions to the topic, in fact overall religion as a topic of inquiry was characterized by relative neglect (Kivisto 1992). This neglect can be seen in Sylvia PedrazaBailey’s conceptual map of immigration research published two years earlier. In her effort to summarize the major themes structuring what she called the recent “veritable boom in immigration research,” religion does not appear as one of those themes, not even as – to use her metaphor – a blue highway, by which she means an unpaved road (Pedraza-Bailey 1990: 43).

Since the early 1990s, a lot has changed. A substantial body of research on religion and immigration has been published, with the result being that much has been done to redress the earlier marginalization of the religious factor in immigration studies (Warner 1998a; Yang and Ebaugh 2001; Cadge and Ecklund 2007; Massey and Higgins 2011). Within sociology proper, within the sociology of religion subfield, immigrant religion is today a hot topic, the way that the study of new religious movements was two decades earlier. Meanwhile, many established sociologists of immigration who have not previously focused on religion are doing so (e.g., Foner and Alba 2008; Massey and Espinoza 2011), while younger colleagues have picked up on the topic early in their careers. When they revised their best-selling Immigrant America: A Portrait for a third edition, Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut (2006: xvii) included a lengthy and in their word “overdue” chapter on religion. A relatively short time ago one could bemoan the lack of attention paid to religion and immigration, and proffer possible explanations for why this might be the case (e.g., the secular biases of sociologists). Today one is left with the daunting task of sifting through a very large body of research in order to: (1) discern the lessons learned from it; (2) distill central themes shaping the agenda; and (3) point to current shortcomings and lacunae. All this would be essential if one wants to distill a synthetic account of the state of the field.

Outline of Major Themes

The goal I have set out in this book is to provide such an account. In so doing, I have identified four topics that can be found running through the literature, sometimes intertwined, often not. Each of these topics will be taken up in subsequent chapters, beginning with chapter 2, where we address whether or not religion functions to promote immigrant adjustment. Here we are concerned with determining if, when, and how religion plays a role in facilitating an individual immigrant’s ability to come to terms with his or her new home. Is religion a source of solace? Does it offer spiritual compensation for earthly distress? Is it a vehicle for incorporation? Is religious affiliation a means for making claims directed at the receiving society about moral worthiness? On the other hand, do inherited religious traditions inhibit an immigrant’s ability to become a full societal member? These and related questions concerning the impact of religious belief, practice, and affiliation on immigrants will be explored through an explication of the literature. An intriguing – though at this point rather speculative question – concerns differences in adjustment patterns between immigrants involved in institutional religion and those who are not.

Chapter 3 is concerned with institutional reframing. One aspect of reframing involves the form that religious organizations take in the new homeland. R. Stephen Warner (1994, 1998a) has argued that in the United States the religions of immigrants have tended to take on a congregational form, thereby adapting institutionally to the Christian – indeed, Protestant – character of American religion. This chapter investigates this phenomenon, paying particular attention to the implications of shifts in institutional structure on religious practice and levels of religious commitment. It also examines the extent to which institutional framing has facilitated civic engagement.

Another aspect of institutional reframing concerns relations between immigrant religious communities and the religious institutions of the receiving society. This would include such topics as ecumenical initiatives to foster at a minimum tolerance and maximally recognition and respect, denominational support of new immigrant religious bodies, and support for and resistance to the promotion of multi-ethnic institutions. Given that Warner’s thesis can be read as being based at least implicitly on a version of American exceptionalism, this chapter offers fertile ground for comparative assessments of different national settings.

Chapter 4 analyzes the topic of religious transnationalism, which as a critical aspect of socio-cultural transnationalism has only in the past decade or so begun to receive the scholarly attention it merits. Using a distinction made by Peggy Levitt (2004), this chapter will address both what it means for individual immigrants to live transnational lives and the role of institutions representing the various major world religions in promoting the creation of transnational social spaces. The primary framework of this chapter will be on research that has employed the transnational optic to explore the interplay between origins and destinations in shaping the religious identities, beliefs, practices, and institutions of both migrants and non-migrants alike. The final topic introduced in the chapter concerns the role of religion in shaping homeland engagements, including in some instances promoting political agendas.

Contrary to postnationalist thinkers (Soysal 1994) and the influence of the postnationalist thesis on some theorists of transnationalism, recent research on the power of states to determine not only who gets in but on what terms calls for a need to bring the state back into the terms of analysis. Chapter 5 is devoted to precisely this topic, focusing on the role of receiving states in articulating and advancing top-down state policies concerning religion (Joppke and Torpey 2013). It also examines the place of religion in the public sphere and the role of collective actors in civil society in developing bottom-up, rather than top-down, responses to the expansion of religious diversity in liberal democracies. State and civil society are, of course, intertwined in a dialogical relationship. Thus, if public opinion suggests a repudiation of a government’s integration policies, the state must take note.

While much of what is occurring in these interrelated spheres has proven to be uncontroversial, religion has not always insulated immigrants from hostility directed at them by members of the larger society, and in fact has sometimes been the central core of animus. This chapter analyzes the challenges to immigrant inclusion posed by prejudice and discrimination. Not surprisingly, since 9/11 and subsequent terrorist acts in places such as London, Madrid, and Bali, Muslims have been the objects of the greatest levels of antipathy. For that reason, though not the sole topic of this chapter, the growing presence of Islam in the West will receive the greatest amount of attention. In this regard, given the fact that there are differences in the levels of and forms taken by anti-Muslim sentiment in different countries, this chapter will offer the opportunity for comparative assessment.

Of course, immigrant religious adherents need not simply be victims and innocents; they can also be advocates of violence, or promoters of what Mark Juergensmeyer (2003) refers to as “terror in the mind of God.” Furthermore, conflict need not be violent, but can take various other more or less legitimate forms. It is clear that the fears associated with Islamophobia are disproportionate to the actual threat of jihadist violence. At the same time, the evidence in several nations with large Muslim populations points to troubling levels of social and economic marginalization. It is within this context that a climate of anxiety about the presumed failure of incorporative efforts plays out. When venturing into this topic, it becomes clear that one is dealing with a rapidly evolving topic and sociological analysis frequently gives way to the journalism of the moment.

Chapter 6, a brief epilogue, attempts to draw some admittedly circumspect conclusions based on the juxtaposition of the primary lessons to be drawn to date from each of the four topics. For instance, it will look at the question of whether immigrant religions over time will continue to prove to be bulwarks against secularization (admittedly entering into contested territory characterized by thorny debates over secularization theory), or whether the offspring of the immigrant generation, as they become more familiar with the receiving society and less familiar with the society of their parents, will as a consequence imbibe the secular culture of the new homeland. Or will they select religious options available in that homeland that are more consonant with its core values, in the process abandoning the religion of their parents? Or will they seek to revise, reform, or in some ways reshape their inherited religion to make it more fully conform to the cultural expectations of that homeland? Ultimately, these and related questions come down to the issue of how immigrants and non-immigrants alike confront what Robert Wuthnow (2005) has referred to as the “challenges of religious diversity.”

The Religious Diversity of Immigrants

What do we know about the religious affiliations of contemporary migrants? The short answer is, considerably less than we wish we knew. In tracking the flows of migrants across international borders, the standard definitional unit is national origin, not religious affiliation. And the main tools of analysis, such as the passport, reinforce the idea that we define people by their national origins. Thus, one can obtain rather precise data on the number of legal (the undocumented are, of course, another story) immigrants who have entered the United States over a specified period of time from Mexico and various countries in Central and South America, and one can obtain similar data on the number of immigrants that have entered France legally from the nations of the Maghreb and from its former foreign territories. Similar data on religious affiliation have been, for the large part, lacking. This being said, there have been studies devoted to examining specific religious groups moving to particular destination countries, and there have been efforts to look at particular religions in differing national contexts (e.g., Foner and Alba 2008; Mooney 2009). However, such work has been rather limited in scope and none of it has provided a comprehensive global overview.

It is with this lack of crucial information in mind that the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project – an effort jointly funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation – has attempted to provide a broad overview of the movement of religions across borders along with the individuals that embrace them, in what is intended to be a baseline for further data-gathering efforts. Headed by primary researcher Phillip Connor, a report titled “Faith on the Move: The Religious Affiliation of International Migrants” appeared in March of 2012 and immediately received considerable media attention, as reflected, for example, in the headline of Tamara Audi’s (2012) article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal, proclaiming “US Top Draw for Christians and Buddhists.”

The United Nations estimates that in 2010 there were 214 million migrants globally, representing 3.1 percent of the total population of the world. Although the number of migrants had nearly tripled over the past half century, as a percentage of overall world population, the rise had only amounted to a 0.5 percent increase. At the same time, 214 million is a very large figure. In fact, there are only four countries in the world whose populations exceed that number. Given that immigrants often differ in significant demographic ways (such as age, gender composition, educational attainment, and the like) from those who stay behind and given that they constitute such a small slice of the global population, an immediate question arises concerning how well they are reflective of or differ from the primary religious affiliations of those who stay behind.

We will not concern ourselves here about the complexity of the project undertaken by the Pew Research Center, stitching together in order to obtain their estimates a substantial number of different censuses and surveys and complementing them with other data sources, such as the University of Sussex’s Global Migrant Origin Database, when existing surveys or censuses did not suffice. Instead, we will concentrate on the main findings of the report, which while extremely valuable, should be seen for what they are: “a baseline look at the nominal affiliation of migrants, with no attempt to measure their levels of religious commitment” (“Faith on the Move” 2012: 8). In this project, it should be noted, researchers used the United Nations Population Division’s definition of an immigrant as an individual who has lived for a year or more outside of the country in which he or she was born.

Table 1.1 provides a portrait of the religious composition of international migrants. As can be readily seen, Christians comprise by far the largest overall percentage, representing just under a half of all immigrants. Muslims are a distant second, their portion of the total being more than 20 percentage points lower than Christians. That being said, Muslims account for slightly over a quarter of all international migrants and comprise a far larger percentage than any of the other reported categories. Indeed, the next largest category, the unaffiliated, accounts for only 9 percent of the total, while in descending order, Hindus account for 5 percent, other religions for 4 percent (this includes such groups as Sikhs, Jains, Taoists, and members of various folk and traditional religions), Buddhists for 3 percent, and Jews for 2 percent (see table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Religious Composition of International Migrants

Religious affiliation

Number

Percentage

Christian

105,670,000

49

Muslim

  58,580,000

27

Unaffiliated

  19,330,000

  9

Hindu

  10,700,000

  5

Other religions

    9,110,000

  4

Buddhist

    7,310,000

  4

Jewish

    3,650,000

  4

Data source: Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life Global Religion and Migration Database 2010

It is perhaps not surprising that Christians and Muslims are the two largest groups due to the fact that they are also the two largest world religions. That being said, given that at 2.3 billion adherents, Christians account for one-third of the world’s population overall, their nearly 50 percent level among immigrants indicates that they are rather significantly overrepresented in the ranks of international movers. In the case of Muslims, the levels are closer, for whereas Islam’s 1.6 billion adherents worldwide constitute 23 percent of the world’s population, at 27 percent, the overall share of global migrants is only slightly higher. Jews, too, are overrepresented. By far the smallest of the world’s major religions (indeed, there are somewhat more Sikhs than Jews in the world), at 0.2 percent, the 3,650,000 Jewish migrants amount to 2 percent of the total. All of the other categories reported are underrepresented in the ranks of immigrants, with Hindus being the most underrepresented. Looked at from a different angle, Jews offer evidence of being the classic diasporic people, for 25 percent of all Jews living today have migrated. This far exceeds the next highest figure, which is 5 percent for Christians. Muslims follow at 4 percent, the unaffiliated and Buddhists at 2 percent, and other and Hindus at 1 percent (“Faith on the Move” 2012: 11–12).

With this global perspective, we turn to an examination of specific regions and nations, both as points of origin and as destinations. The focus of this book is on immigrants to developed nations, or even more specifically to the nations of North America and Western Europe. However, it is useful to place those nations in comparative perspective. An examination of the top ten countries with the largest number of international migrants is instructive, for four of the ten are from outside those two regions. After the United States – the consummate nation of immigrants which with nearly 43 million immigrants is currently home to one-fifth of all international migrants – the country with the next largest number of migrants is the Russian Federation. Followed close behind is Germany, the only other nation with over 10 million immigrants. As table 1.2 indicates, the remaining seven nations contain between 5.2 and 7.2 million immigrants, interestingly with Saudi Arabia having a higher total than Canada, France, the United Kingdom, and Spain (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2010).

Taking the Pew Center’s seven religious categories, “Faith on the Move” identifies the country of origin providing the largest number of immigrants for each. In the case of Christians, the source country is Mexico, while for Muslims it is the Palestinian Territories. For Jews, it is Russia, for Hindus the country is India, and for Buddhists it is Vietnam. China is the top country for both other religions and the unaffiliated (“Faith on the Move” 2012: 15).

Table 1.2 Top Ten Countries with the Largest Number of International Migrants

Country

Estimated number of international migrants

United States

42,813,000

Russian Federation

12,270,000

Germany

10,758,000

Saudi Arabia

  7,289,000

United Kingdom

  6,452,000

Spain

  6,378,000

India

  5,436,000

Ukraine

  5,258,000

Data source: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, Trends in International Migrant Stock: The 2008 Revision, UN database (New York: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2009). Available at http://esa.un.org/migration/index.asp?panel=1

In terms of destination, the United States is the number one country for Christians, followed by Russia, Germany, Spain, Canada, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, Australia, France, and Italy. The United States is also the number one country for Buddhists, followed by Singapore, India, Hong Kong, Australia, Canada, Japan, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Germany. Finally, the United States is the main destination of the unaffiliated, followed by Russia, Germany, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Spain, and France. Israel is the main destination for Jews, followed by the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, Spain, Brazil, and France. Saudi Arabia is the main destination country for Muslims, followed by Russia, Germany, France, Jordan, Pakistan, the United States, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Syria (of course, reflecting the period before the current rebellion). India is both the number one country of origin for Hindus and the number one destination country. As destination, it is followed by the United States, Bangladesh, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Sri Lanka. Meanwhile, the number one destination for those listed in the other religions grouping is Hong Kong, followed by the United States, Ivory Coast, Japan, the United Kingdom, India, Thailand, Canada, South Africa, and France (“Faith on the Move” 2012: 16–50).

In this detailed listing, two things are clear. Some countries, particularly the United States and Canada in North America and the large countries of Western Europe – Germany, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom – tend to appear over and over in the lists, reflecting their centrality as immigrant destinations at present. Many immigrants are prepared to travel substantial distances to arrive in these destinations. On the other hand, some countries appear only once in all the lists. For immigrants moving to these destinations, it appears that migration is defined in regional rather than global terms and involves one particular religion, as with the cases of Nepal and Sri Lanka for Hindus and Cambodia and Malaysia for Buddhists.

Near the end of the report, the authors turn their “spotlight” first on the United States and then on Europe, or more specifically the member states of the European Union. In addition to being the number one destination for Christians and Buddhists, as noted above, the United States is also the number two destination for Hindus and Jews. However, it ranks only seventh as a destination for Muslims. In terms of the overall religious composition of immigrants, 74 percent are Christian, with the unaffiliated at 10 percent constituting the next largest group. The remaining religious groups divide up the rest of the population, with Muslims at 5 percent, Buddhists at 4 percent, Hindus at 3 percent, other religions at 2 percent, and Jews at 1 percent (“Faith on the Move” 2012: 52).

To put these findings into perspective in terms of the larger patterns of religious affiliation, the percentage of immigrants who are Christian is only slightly less than the 78.4 percent Christian figure for the entire US population. The percentage of Jewish immigrants is actually slightly smaller than the 1.7 percent of the overall population that is Jewish. This is also true of the unaffiliated, for 16.1 percent of the total population reports being unaffiliated. On the other hand, in the case of the other three major world religions, the percentage of the immigrant population exceeds that of the overall population, where the respective percentages are 0.7 percent for Buddhists, 0.6 percent for Muslims, and 0.4 percent for Hindus (US Religious Landscape Survey 2008: 10). Given that the numbers for each of these three groups – both in terms of immigrants and citizens/permanent residents – are small, the increases have not resulted in dramatic reconfigurations of the nation’s religious landscape, though clearly it has become more rather than less diverse over time.

Turning to Europe, the situation becomes more complicated. First, it is necessary to account for national differences in a number of crucial areas, such as but certainly not limited to differing groundings for citizenship and national identity (as with Brubaker’s [1992] civic versus ethnic distinction), differing welfare state regimes (as with Esping-Andersen’s [1990] three welfare state regimes: liberal, corporate, and social democratic), and differing types of church/state relations (analyzed by Joppke and Torpey [2013]). Second, the fact that the European Union is a unique trans-state entity and that with the passage of the Schengen Agreement in 1985 the citizens of its member states have the ability to move freely among the states, it is often necessary when speaking about immigrants to distinguish between movements across national borders by citizens of the EU in contrast to third-party nationals from outside the EU. Third, there are substantial differences in economic development and in the stability of democratic rule between the most developed Western members of the EU and the new ascension states of Eastern Europe.

With these factors in mind, the EU’s current 27 members have a combined population of just over 500 million, making it considerably larger than the 312 million in the United States. This comparison is useful when observing that in contrast to the 43 million immigrants in the United States, the EU has 47 million, a larger number, but a smaller percentage of the overall population – about 14 percent compared to 9 percent. That being said, some of the member states have been impacted by immigration to a much greater extent than other member states. The report notes that many of the larger and most developed nations have immigrant populations that as a percentage of the overall population approximate that of the United States.

The religious composition of immigrants in the EU can be described in two ways, either by including migrants from within the EU or by excluding them. The comparison between the two is revealing insofar as it highlights the growing presence of Muslims from outside of the EU. The real issue is the relative percentage of Christians versus Muslims since all of the other groups reported in “Faith on the Move” not only constitute a small overall percentage of immigrants, but the differences between all immigrants versus only those outside the EU are minimal. Thus, the figure for Jews in both instances is a mere 1 percent and likewise for Hindus it is 2 percent. The figure for Buddhists increases from 2 percent for all immigrants to 3 percent for those outside the EU and comparably the figure for other religions increases from 3 percent to 4 percent. In contrast, the figure for the unaffiliated decreases slightly for immigrants from outside of the EU, dropping from 10 percent for all immigrants to 8 percent for those from non-EU countries.

With these contrasts as backdrop, if one considers all immigrants, Christians constitute 56 percent of the total. That figure drops substantially to 42 percent when looking only at immigrants from outside of the EU. At the same time, the Muslim figure of 27 percent for all immigrants rises significantly to 39 percent when excluding migration from within the EU. In other words, when considering migrants from outside the EU, the totals for Christians and Muslims are very similar, as the actual numbers indicate: 13,170,000 Christians versus 12,290,000 Muslims. One way of looking at this is to note that slightly more than half of Christian migrants come from within the EU (13,200,000), while this is true of only 620,000 Muslims.

Thus, despite the fact of free movement across the borders of EU states, in fact relatively few Muslims are making this internal migration. This is, no doubt, a reflection of the fact that Muslims from EU countries constitute a comparatively small percentage of the European religious mix. On the other hand, given that the dominant religion of EU member states is Christianity, it is not surprising that such a large number of internal migrants are Christian. The origins of Christians from outside the EU are varied. The largest numbers come from Russia and other former communist nations to the east, but the origins of Christian immigrants also include the United States, several Latin American countries, as well as several from sub-Saharan Africa (“Faith on the Move” 2012: 54–5).

Given that the Islamic presence in North America and even more so in Western Europe evokes anxiety (thus, we speak of Islamophobia, but not Hinduphobia and the like) and often overt hostility in a way that is not true for other major world religions, it is useful to consider what projections tell us about the likely demographic significance of Muslims in these countries as we proceed further into the twenty-first century. As will become evident in the chapter on religious inclusion and exclusion, Islam is more often perceived to be a problem in Western Europe than it is in North America. One very simple reason for the difference, which does not in and of itself offer a sufficient explanation for the differences in responses, but nonetheless does account in part for them, is that Muslims are and will continue to be a larger part of the overall population mix in Western Europe than in North America.

According to the projections of the Pew Research Center contained in their report, “The Future of the Global Muslim Population” (2011: 142), in terms of numerical increases, the Muslim population in North America will grow dramatically over the next two decades. In the United States, it will more than double, from 2.6 million in 2010 to 6.2 million in 2030. Similar growth is projected for Canada during the same time frame, rising from just under a million to 2.6 million. However, in both countries, they will continue to be a small minority of the overall population. Canada’s Muslim minority is projected to increase from 2.8 percent in 2010 to 6.6 percent in 2030, while that in the United States will increase from 0.8 percent to only 1.7 percent.

In the case of Europe, the Pew Center’s study observes that as a percentage of the world’s total Muslim population, those living in Europe are and will continue to be a small percentage, rising to 3 percent by 2030. Most Muslims in Europe do and will continue to reside in countries in Eastern Europe, where rather than being recent immigrants, they have long historic roots. Kosovo and Albania are, in fact, Muslim majority nations and have been for centuries. They are projected to become over the next two decades respectively 93.5 percent and 83.2 percent Muslim. While the report breaks Europe into four regions – North, South, East, and West – for our purposes the countries of interest are the wealthiest ones.

Figure 1.1 examines these 17 countries. The first thing to note is that taking them as a whole, the current percentage of Muslims is 4.5, which is higher than that of North America, but still a relatively small figure. The projection calls for that to rise to 7.1 percent by 2030. Second, there are rather pronounced differences among these nations. Some countries currently have very small Muslim populations and that will likely continue to be the case. Finland’s 0.8 percent figure for 2010 will only rise to 1.9 percent (which, incidentally, almost exactly parallels the United States), and Ireland, Luxembourg (despite its very high level of immigrants overall), and Portugal will have percentages of Muslims under 3 percent. At the other end of the spectrum are the countries that have and will continue to have the highest percentages. Only two countries, France and Belgium, are projected to have Muslim population percentages over 10 percent. They are followed by Sweden and Austria, whose estimates are in the 9 percent range, and these in turn are followed by the United Kingdom and Switzerland, with projections in the 8 percent range, and Germany with slightly over 7 percent (“The Future” 2011: 124).

Figure 1.1 Muslims as a percentage of the total population in selected countries (estimated 2010 and projected 2030)

Data source: “The Future of the Global Muslim Population.” 2011. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.

Why belabor the fact that Muslims comprise small percentages of the populations of all countries in North America and Western Europe? One reason is that it will help to put into perspective the realities on the ground when we turn to the topic of religious conflict in chapter 5, in which Islam will understandably be the focus of concern. Voices on the extreme right depict the movement of Muslims into the West as an invasion or an assault. Thus, the masthead of the Gates of Vienna website reads, “At the siege of Vienna in 1683 Islam seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe. We are in a new phase of a very old war” (http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com