Social Science Research Council

The International Migration Program organized two working groups focusing on religion and migration in an effort to redress the absence of religion in previous program initiatives and explore both the role of religion in immigrant life and the effect of migration on religious institutions and practices. While the first of these working groups focused on religion and immigrant incorporation in the United States, the second widened its scope to examine how religion and migration interact globally. With support from the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Ford Foundation, these working groups represent the International Migration Program's attempt to "bring religion back" in to migration studies.

Religion, Immigration and Civic Life

Despite a respected tradition of social science research and writing about the relation between immigration and religion (Oscar Handlin's influential chapter on religion in The Uprooted, for example, or Will Herberg's classic Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology, both from the 1950s), consideration of the role of religion in immigrant incorporation has been strikingly limited in contemporary scholarship. With this in mind, the Religion, Immigration and Civic Life Working Group was formed to address this omission and stimulate scholars of immigration to take up neglected questions of religion in immigrant life.

The end result is a forthcoming volume entitled Immigrants and Religion in America, Past and Present, edited by Dr. Richard Alba, SUNY Albany, and Dr. Albert Raboteau, Princeton University, which compares the religious and migratory experiences of four pairs of migrant groups. With scholars of religion and migration collaborating in writing about each case, each comparison focuses on an aspect of religion shared by a past and present group - respectively, Italians and Mexicans, Japanese and Koreans, Jews and Arab Muslims, and African-Americans and Haitians. More Information . . .

Transnational Religion, Migration and Diversity

The Working Group on Transnational Religion, Migration and Diversity was established in 2000 with funding from the Ford Foundation, to explore and develop an analytical framework for investigating how cross-border activities of religion and migration intersect with one another and influence social and cultural diversity in places of origin and settlement. The project began with the idea that relations between transnational migration and religion and their implications for diversity within different geographic contexts should be understood in relation to one another. By bringing together scholars from different disciplinary and geographical perspectives, the working group is exploring movement, creativity, diversity, and conformity across religious networks as they become territorialized in different contexts.

Twenty scholars with expertise about a variety of religions, migrant groups, and geographic areas of the world assembled in Istanbul in June 2002. The participants' research backgrounds covered different types of religions (Catholicism, Pentecostalism, Islam, Hinduism, Rastafarianism, and African-origin spiritism) and transnational migration flows (between North America, the Caribbean, South America, Western Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia). In addition to presenting and discussing their own research and its connections to the themes and goals of our project, the meeting provided an opportunity to consider Istanbul and Turkey as a particular case and to acquaint participating Turkish scholars with the working group's transnational perspective.

In January 2004, the working group held its second meeting in Cape Town to examine these issues in the South African context. While in South Africa the geographic focus was defined by the nation-state, in December 2004 the working group met in Malaysia, focusing regionally on South East Asia in order to take into account historically enduring, regional migration and religious networks not fully captured by a national perspective. A final meeting is planned for Fall 2005 and will be aimed at developing a future research proposal and/or summarizing and publishing the group's work and findings to date.