Religion as a push-pull factor

SIGNIFICANCE:Most immigrants to America from earliest colonial times have had specific religious affiliations—many have sought American residence because of their beliefs and practices. Hostile attitudes and policies in native countries often alienated and pushed out religious minorities, while America’s reputation for freedom drew them to its shores. Developed or developing American faith communities continued to draw foreign coreligionists, even in the face of sporadic or endemic prejudice by some Americans.

Colonial Patterns

From 1620 to roughly 1800, most immigrants who established and developed the thirteen English colonies—and later the United States—were from the British Isles. There, Christianity was the dominant and official religion, but it took several forms in the wake of the Reformation. Jamestown and later Virginia colonists—drawn largely by economic motives—tended to be members of the Protestant Church of England, headed by the English monarch. Roman Catholics who resisted the royal religious reforms remained a distinct, untrusted, and sometimes persecuted minority, while other Protestants who were influenced by the more radical ideas of John Calvin—including Scottish Presbyterians, English Puritans, Separatists, and Baptists—lived more or less comfortably with the state church.

The Pilgrims of 1620 were Separatists who sought the freedom to worship as they pleased—first in Holland and then in America. They were soon followed by large numbers of Puritans, who abandoned an increasingly hostile king for new shores on which they could establish a church and community that could serve as a model for purifying the English (Anglican) Church. During the Great Migration of 1630–40, as many as twenty thousand Pilgrims may have crossed the Atlantic. The Massachusetts Bay Colony grew with the flow of other disaffected Puritans in the lead-up to and during the English Civil War (1642–51). The earliest Jewish community in America was founded by twenty-three Sephardic refugees from Brazil who fled Portuguese Roman Catholic authorities to settle in New Amsterdam—later New York City—in 1654. Despite opposition by the colony’s director-general—Peter Stuyvesant—the Dutch West India Company insisted on their being allowed to settle among the Dutch Reformed Christians.

Puritan intolerance continued to characterize Massachusetts and led to the founding of Rhode Island Colony by the freethinking and unusually tolerant Roger Williams. Royal support created havens for beleaguered English Catholics in Maryland (1630s) and newly emerging Protestant Quakers in Pennsylvania (1680s). Above all colonies, Pennsylvania—with the burgeoning city of Philadelphia—opened itself to a wide range of immigrants who had suffered as Protestant religious minorities back home. These included the Pennsylvania “Dutch”—from "Deutsch," meaning German—German Anabaptists such as the Amish and Mennonites, who had suffered prejudice and persecution since the 1520s, and French Calvinists—Huguenots—who sought refuge after King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The failure of the Puritan Commonwealth in England and the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 created another wave of Puritan immigration to New England, along with a large number of Scottish and English Presbyterians.

Middle- and upper-class Irish Protestants, Anglicans, and especially Presbyterians—usually Scotch-Irish—began leaving Ireland in the wake of the Irish campaigns of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89. Drawn more by freedom of opportunity than by religious motives, these pioneers placed their stamp especially on the southern colonies of the Carolinas and Georgia. Irish Catholics—though impoverished and oppressed by Parliament’s Penal Laws—were generally unwelcome and too poor to emigrate. Along the fringes of British colonial territory, French Jesuits in Canada and Louisiana and Spanish Franciscans in Florida, the southwestern interior, and the California coast served as Roman Catholic missionaries among the indigenous population—as did Russian Orthodox monks along the coastal northwest from Canada to California.

Nineteenth Century

American independence and constitutional guarantees established a framework for a religiously neutral nation—though many states initially retained official denominations and the privileges associated with them. In 1785, only one percent of the American population was Roman Catholic, a situation that was steadily expanded with Irish—and later Continental—immigration from the 1820s. Although the British Parliament lifted most of the anti–Irish Catholic Penal Laws by the 1820s, Irish Catholic peasants still suffered the effects of economic oppression rooted in religious prejudice. Many sought out America for economic and religious opportunities. The infamous Great Irish Famine (1845–52)—which killed and scattered millions of Irish—was exacerbated by British Protestant anti-Catholicism and resulting poverty.

Although American anti-Catholic nativists opposed large-scale immigration, hundreds of thousands of refugees joined family members or started new lives in cities such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. The blight that struck Ireland destroyed crops in central and eastern Europe. German and Polish German Catholic peasants living under officially Lutheran rule suffered social and economic hardship—they left for America in increasing numbers. As pioneer communities became established—especially in the upper Midwest—chain migration brought relatives and fellow villagers to the American frontier.

The same pattern affected Scandinavian immigration from the 1820s. The official Lutheran Church in Norway made life difficult for Quakers, many of whom chose to immigrate. Lutherans who chafed under the strictness of the official churches also gravitated to the United States. Before 1860, there were about fifteen thousand Swedes in America—that number grew to 600,000 between 1869 and 1893. Orthodox and other Christians in eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire suffered intolerance and outright persecution—many fled to America. Roman Catholic authorities in the eastern lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire failed to understand the nuanced identities of Uniate Christians—whom they lumped with Orthodox and treated as outsiders. Muslim Turks particularly oppressed Orthodox populations from the 1890s, culminating in the infamous Armenian genocide and the emigration of three hundred thousand Greek Orthodox between 1890 and 1910—and another three hundred thousand from 1910 to 1920.

At the same time, large numbers of Jewish people living under oppressive Christian regimes in central and eastern Europe began immigrating to the United States. In 1820, America was home to about 4,000 Jews—many of whom retained ties to their homelands. Over the following six decades, the number swelled to 150,000—most from central Europe. Both societal and political anti-Semitism made life miserable for entire Jewish communities—spurring many to migrate. Existing Jewish American communities along the East Coast promised and provided a new home. As ever a despised minority in Europe, Jews flocked to America—which many came to see as a new Promised Land. Between 1881 and 1900, a period of increased Russian anti-Jewish violence, two-thirds of eastern Europe’s Jewish population—an estimated 675,000 people—emigrated to America, often as full families. As Europe grew more bellicose, another 1,346,000 Jews fled its shores for the United States between 1900 and 1914.

Southern Italian Catholics experienced famine and great poverty rather than intolerance, and they came to America by the thousands. About three hundred thousand arrived from 1880 to 1890—average annual numbers doubled during the 1890s. A large percentage of these were young men seeking work and expected to return to Italy later in life. Instead, the well-established Italian American communities—and especially the ethnic Catholic churches—helped retain many of these immigrants, who often called for their families to join them.

Twentieth Century

The twentieth century was marked by religious persecution that served the purposes of totalitarian ideologies and regimes—many of those who suffered sought refuge in America. Anti-immigration laws passed in 1921 and 1924, however, set the tone for the next four decades by severely limiting annual numbers. Bolshevik victories in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the ensuing civil war sent many Russian Orthodox Christians and Jews fleeing westward. Nazi Germany’s campaign to eradicate European Jews during World War II—first in Germany and then in conquered territories—ran up against America’s very restrictive Johnson Act of 1924. As well, popular—if understated—American anti-Semitism blamed the Great Depression on powerful Jewish economic interests and damped American sympathy. A rather small portion of those who fled the Third Reich during the 1930s found a welcome in the United States—all requiring American sponsors who oversaw their transition into contributing Americans. Between the onset of World War II (1939-45) and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the United States absorbed some 140,000 Jews fleeing or surviving the Holocaust.

Though theoretically tolerant of Jews and sponsors of a puppet Orthodox Church, the Soviet regime from Vladimir Lenin to Mikhail Gorbachev oppressed the faithful of both religions. During the Cold War following World War II, many exceptions to official immigration policies were made on behalf of high-profile figures and groups. During the 1970s and again during the 1990s, around three hundred thousand Jews fled the initial official anti-Semitic state activity, then later fled popular resentment and bigotry unleashed by the fall of the Communist regime. In 1968, American coreligionists and sympathizers formed the Jewish Defense League, which applied pressure on the Soviets to end mistreatment of Jews in the Soviet Union and urged the US government to apply diplomatic pressure to the same end.

As an officially atheistic ideology, communism prompted religious and political refugee movements worldwide, and after 1965 the United States once again became a major destination for many of those displaced. Chinese Christians and Buddhists fled from Mao Zedong’s armies during the late 1940s and hundreds of thousands of oppressed Catholic Cubans sought American soil in several waves starting in 1959. After China’s invasion of Tibet in 1950, Tibetan Buddhists followed the Dalai Lama into exile—many choosing the United States as a new home. After the Vietnam War, countless South Vietnamese “boat people”—many of whom were Catholic or Buddhist and expected antireligious persecution from the triumphant North Vietnamese Communists—floated in search of transport to the United States. Early waves established religious and ethnic communities that continued to draw immigrants pushed out by religious, political, and economic conditions.

During the late twentieth century, wars in Somalia and other parts of Africa pitted well-supplied Muslim forces against minority religious and ethnic groups, many of whom fled to the United States as a result. Other African or Afro-Caribbean religious minorities in the United States faced legal restrictions on traditional practices. However, the US Supreme Court’s 1993 decision in Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah sanctioned animal sacrifice by practitioners of Santería. Such liberalization encouraged the migration of as many as eight hundred thousand Haitians—many of whom practiced Haitian Vodou.

A large majority of people who immigrated to the United States prior to the 2010s were Christians. Mexican immigrants were the largest of this group. In the 2020s, these demographics began to change. There were 55 percent of immigrants who were Christians—below the average American-born Christian population at 64 percent. Although Christian immigrants from Central America remained the largest ethnic group—in terms of a single country of origin—China surpassed all others. The majority of Chinese immigrants did not affiliate with a religion. Another major country of origin was India, where the majority population was Hindu. In the 2020s, immigrants of the Muslim or Hindu faith comprised 32 percent of immigrant totals. Religious persecution was not the primary reason for the majority of 2020 immigration. Other factors were more influential, including refugees from war zones, global climate change, and economic motivations.

In 2020, a total of 280 million people—3.6 percent of the world’s population—were born in a different country than where they were presently living. Christians were the largest religious grouping that undertook immigration—47 percent. Mexico was the most common country of origin for immigrants and the United States was the recipient of the largest number of arrivals. Muslims were the next largest immigrant religious grouping—29 percent—followed by those without a religious affiliation. More Muslim immigrants were of Syrian descent than any other nationality. Countries in the Middle East and North Africa—particularly Saudi Arabia—were the preferred destination for Syrian immigrants. Hindu immigrants were both most likely to depart from India and to immigrate to the United States. By the mid-2020s, international migration continued to expand, with total migrant numbers rising above 300 million worldwide.

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