What Role Does Religion Play in the Migration Process? And Vice Versa? Evidence from the New Immigrant Survey

Monica E. Higgins, Princeton University

We use data from the New Immigrant Survey to describe the composition of religious preference among the new legal immigrants. In a previous paper, the religious preference of immigrants was analyzed using the NIS-Pilot data. This paper extends that work, using a nationally representative prospective-retrospective study, to support the robustness of the previous results and to analyze and describe new findings of the different faith traditions and interrelations among the religions of the respondents, and of their spouses and offspring, as well as changes in faith over time. We pay particular attention to the immigrants’ behaviors across immigration visa categories, countries of origin, educational attainment, gender, and migration history. This focus is particularly relevant in the context of analyzing the characteristics of the major faith traditions as well as the immigration directions. We draw conclusions and make comparisons with the literature regarding the religious composition of the native-born U.S. population.