Almost Half of World's Migrants are Christian, Pew Research Shows

The Banner has a subscription to republish articles from Religion News Service. This story by Chloë-Arizona Fodor was published on religionnews.com Aug. 19, 2024. It has been edited for length and Banner style.

The world’s 280 million immigrants—people who live outside of their country of birth, regardless of when they relocated—have greater shares of Christians, Muslims, and Jews than the general population, according to a new Pew Research Center study released Aug. 19.

“You see migrants coming to places like the U.S., Canada, different places through Western Europe, and being more religious—and sometimes more Christian in particular—than the native-born people in those countries,” said Stephanie Kramer, the study’s lead researcher.

While Christians make up about 30% of the world’s population, the world’s migrants are 47% Christian, according to the latest data collected in 2020. The study found that Muslims make up 29% of the migrant population but 25% of the world’s population. Jews, only 0.2% of the world’s population but 1% of migrants, are by far the most likely religious group to have migrated, with 20% of Jews worldwide living outside their country of birth compared to just 6% of Christians and 4% of Muslims.

Four percent of migrants are Buddhist, matching the general population, and 5% are Hindu, compared to 15% of the world population.

Over the past 30 years, the total number of people living as international migrants has increased by 83%, according to Pew.

Though people immigrate for many reasons, including economic opportunity, to reunite with family, and to flee violence or persecution, religion and migration are often closely connected, the report finds. U.S. migrants are much more likely to have a religious identity than the American-born population in general.

The influx of religious migrants can have a significant impact on the religious composition of their destination countries. In the case of the U.S., “immigrants are kind of putting the brakes on secularization,” Callahan said.

While about 30% of individuals in the U.S. overall identify as atheist, agnostic or religiously unaffiliated, only 10% of migrants to the U.S. identify with those categories.

The research findings are based on analyses of migrant counts from the United Nations' "International Migrant Stock 2020" report and religious composition estimates from Pew research Center analyses of 270 censuses and surveys.

“We’re not only interested in the religious composition of people who arrived in a destination country in the last year or in the last five years,” said Kramer. “We are not trying to estimate how many­­­ move in a single year,” said the report, but reflect “patterns that have accumulated over time.”

The study found that migrants frequently move to countries where their religious identity is already represented and prevalent. For example, Israel is the top destination for Jews, with 51% of Jewish migrants (1.5 million) residing there, while Saudi Arabia is the top destination for Muslims, with 13% (10.8 million) residing in the area. Christians and religiously unaffiliated migrants share the U.S., Germany, and Russia as their top three destinations.

Kramer said that immigration levels across religious groups have remained fairly stable over time. Despite consistent numbers, she advocated for doing this study because of the popularity of a 2012 Pew report, Faith on the Move. The two studies used different methodologies, and Kramer described Faith on the Move as a “snapshot” of religion and immigration in 2010.

“A lot of people have asked for an update to it, and we get a lot of questions related to religion and migration,” she said. Despite demand for the data, “Faith on the Move was really the last report we put out that focused on this.”

Many of the findings in the new report are similar to the 2012 study, and Kramer found the results relatively unsurprising.

“Even in that older data, you can see that religious minorities were so much more likely to leave their country of origin and migrate to a country where their religious identity was more prevalent,” she said.

c. 2024 Religion News Service