The Myth of the Devout Immigrant
Why immigration won't reverse America's secular drift
Immigration is a hot topic right now. It feels like it’s been on everyone’s mind over the last decade or so. Donald Trump made it the centerpiece of his campaign in 2016, especially in the Republican primary. But he also hammered the Biden administration’s immigration policies constantly during his 2024 campaign. It certainly feels like it’s swamped a lot of the other discourse about social issues in the last couple of years.
What I find intriguing about the debate on immigration is that there are Republicans who make the argument that allowing a modest amount of new people to enter the United States would be a good thing. This is certainly the position of the Cato Institute, which argues that it will increasingly become the only way to fund the social safety net that is ballooning in the United States. Particularly as tens of millions of Baby Boomers will swell the membership rolls of Social Security and Medicare in the decades to come. With decreased fertility rates among native-born Americans, the only way to inject more workers into the economy is to import them from somewhere else.
There’s another argument for increased immigration that I see every once in a while on my social media feed, though. It’s that immigrants tend to be more religious than people whose family has been in the United States for generations. So, if we bring in a lot of new immigrants, that will move the needle on overall religiosity in this country and stem the tide of secularism that has been increasing since the late 1990s.
But is that actually the case, though? I mean the entire presupposition of that argument is that immigrants to the United States are significantly more religious than folks who already live here. I can test that.
The Cooperative Election Study has been asking a question about immigration status of respondents since 2010. Given the enormous size of the survey, I can actually get pretty fine grained with my analysis here. The question is simply: Which of these statements best describes you?
1. I am an immigrant to the USA and a naturalized citizen
2. I am an immigrant to the USA but not a citizen
3. I was born in the USA but at least one of my parents is an immigrant
4. My parents and I were born in the USA but at least one of my grandparents was an immigrant
5. My parents, grandparents and I were all born in the USA
I am going to collapse the first two response options for simplicity’s sake.
So, are immigrants to the United States more religious than people who have been here for multiple generations? Not really. Among folks who said that they came to the United States themselves, 51% identify as Protestant or Catholic and 35% say that they have no religious affiliation. The remaining 13% are distributed across a whole bunch of smaller religious groups: Jews, Hindus, Muslims, etc. The religious composition of children of immigrants looks almost exactly the same as people who immigrated themselves.
You do see, though, that things begin to shift quite a bit more in the second generation of immigrants. The share who are Christians jumps up to 59% and the non-religious are a bit lower at 33%. But then when we look at folks in the survey who can trace their lineage back on American shores for at least three generations, there’s a whole lot more movement. Among this group, 45% are Protestants - that’s 23 points higher than immigrants. And this “third generation” subgroup is 16 points less likely to be Catholic. But here’s what is ironic about all that: the share who are non-religious is 38%. Among immigrants, it was 35%.
The idea that immigrants are just way more religious than folks who can trace their American ancestry back a hundred years is empirically false. At the highest level, the differences just aren’t that large.
But what happens if I do the same bit of analysis but break it down by the race of the respondent?
There’s a lot going on here, and yet not that much — all at the same time. For instance, the top set of graphs are white respondents. Among immigrants, the Catholic share is low (18%). Among third generation respondents, it’s even lower - 14%. But then in the middle two categories, about a third are Catholic. The share of white immigrants who are nones is 41%. The share of white folks who have been here for generations who are nones is 37%. So, again, bringing in people from majority white countries is not going to make America more religious.
The rest of the racial groups have a few data nuggets here and there. For instance, among Black immigrants, just 26% are non-religious. For African-Americans who can trace their lineage back for multiple generations in the United States, it’s 36% nones. But for Hispanics, there’s basically no change in the nones at all across each type of immigrant. The only thing that jumps out for me is that Hispanics who have multiple generations in the United States are about ten points more likely to be Protestants and ten points less likely to be Catholics.
Remember, though, that the Cooperative Election Study has been asking this question about immigration status for decades. So I can use this data to figure out if immigrants from 2010 looked a lot different in terms of religious composition compared to immigrants from 2024.
There are a couple really subtle patterns here that are worth some study. For instance, the Protestant share of immigrants has slowly been eroding over time. It was 28-29% back in the early 2010s. Today, it’s about five points lower than that. At the same time, the Catholic share has gone down too. But the drop here is more modest - about three percentage points when comparing 2010 to 2024.
The one trend that is completely unmistakable is that immigrants to the United States are noticeably more likely to be non-religious now than immigrants in 2010. In 2010, just 5% of immigrants to the United States said that they were atheist or agnostic and another 19% said that their religion was “nothing in particular.” In 2024, the share of atheist/agnostic immigrants soared to 12% and the nothing in particular portion was up 3 points as well. In total the numbers have risen a full ten percentage points in the last 14 years of data. Again, the idea that immigrants to the United States are particularly religious is just not supported by the data.
I did want to check these numbers against some kind of “reference case”, though. I needed to know if immigrants were becoming secular at a rate that was faster than folks who had been in the United States for generations.
I like this graph because it generates a clear contrast between the two groups. Immigrants are just not very Protestant. In 2012, only 28% of folks who came to the United States said that they were Protestant. For those who had been in the United States for generations, it was 52%. Both groups are less likely to be Protestant now, but the overall gap has narrowed to about 20 points in the 2024 data. The Catholic share among immigrants is noticeably higher than folks who have been here for generations - 31% vs 14% back in 2012. Neither number has moved that much in the last decade.
I don’t think that anyone is surprised to see that immigrants are much more likely to come from the “world religions” category. This includes faith groups like Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists. As I wrote in the American Religious Landscape, these are largely “immigrant religions” in the United States. There just aren’t that many third generation American Muslims. But I think people would be surprised to see that only 14% of immigrants to the United States come from one of these religious groups. That’s lower than Catholics and Protestants.
But the lines for both types of nones are almost the same as each other. For both groups, the share who are non-religious has risen over time and at nearly the same rate. Among immigrants, 12% identify as atheist/agnostic. It’s 14% for the “third generation or more” group. The gap for the nothing in particular category is three percentage points in 2024, as well. Taken together, 39% of folks whose families have been in this country for decades are non-religious. It was 34% of those who immigrated themselves.
Just because I’m sure people are going to ask - here’s religious attendance in those two groups in 2010 and 2024.
There are some small differences in attendance patterns to be seen. For instance, in 2010, 41% of immigrants said that they attended a house of worship less than once a year. It was 48% of the “third generation” crowd. At the same time, though, weekly attendance rates were almost identical: 29% vs 28%. So those immigrants were more likely to go a couple of times a year, but the gap isn’t huge.
In the most recent data, the same general sense emerges. Immigrants are less likely to be in the never/seldom categories. It was 50% of them in 2024 compared to 55% among the “third generation or more” crowd. However, weekly attendance rates were a statistical dead heat: 25% vs 26%. I just can’t walk away from this and think that immigrants are particularly devout. They may be slightly more religious than the rest of America, but not by a huge amount.
To pull this all together into a single bit of analysis, I just calculated one statistic using two samples. The metric I focused on was the percentage of people who identified as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular. I calculated it using the full sample, then I did the same thing but only kept respondents who indicated that their families had been in the United States for at least three generations.
And guess what I found? The differences are just not substantively significant in any meaningful way. In every single year of the survey going back to 2012, the difference is just a single percentage point. In 2012, the full sample was 27% non-religious. If I just looked at people who had been here for a very long time, it was 28%. In 2024, the two numbers were 35% and 34%. Notice how both lines rise and fall in near parallel? That’s even after tens of millions of immigrants have landed on American shores in the last 12 years.
So, why won’t immigrants move the needle in any real way on American religiosity? Two reasons, really. One is that they just aren’t that much more religious than native born Americans. We’ve seen that across all kinds of metrics. The other reason is that there just aren’t enough immigrants to really move the aggregate number that much at all. Yeah, immigrants are about five points less likely to be nones compared to those who have been in the United States for generations. But guess what? Those first and second generation immigrants have nearly the same religious composition as the folks who have been here for three generations or longer.
In other words, the data says that immigrants are assimilating in a very important way - they are leaving religion behind. Just like Americans who have been here for generations are doing.
Code for this post can be found here.
Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.
