This article was originally published in TIME on December 18, 2023.
One of the most basic facts of American political life today is Republican opposition to immigration. According to Gallup, 73 percent of Republicans would prefer to see immigration levels decreased. All the current contenders for the GOP presidential nomination have sharply criticized the Biden Administration on border security, vowing if elected to crack down on illegal immigration, and Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have proposed policies that would reduce legal immigration as well. Republicans in Congress are so concerned about the flow of migrants across the Southern border that they won’t move forward with President Joe Biden’s emergency aid request for Ukraine unless Democrats agree to a deal that would make it harder for people to seek asylum.
But if you think about it, there are good reasons for Republicans to favor more immigration.
Consider religion. In general, the more modern a society becomes—the greater its advances in science, technology and education, the better developed its capitalist economy, the more urban its population—the less sway that religious institutions have over public life, and the less significance that religious beliefs and practices hold for its members. The US has been slower to secularize than Canada or Western Europe, which shows that the process isn’t always straightforward. But as sociologists Isabella Kasselstrand, Phil Zuckerman, and Ryan Cragun have demonstrated, the situation is now changing, with every new birth cohort “less religious than the one before.”
Data from the General Social Survey indicate that in the early 1990s, about 60 percent of Americans aged 18-34 said they believed in God and had no doubts. Today that number stands at 36 percent. Over that same period, the proportion who could be described as atheist or agnostic more than doubled, to 22 percent. In recent years of the survey, about four out of ten younger adults have said that they never attend religious services.
The decline of American religiosity worries many on the right. Sixty-one percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents tell pollsters that religion is “very important” to them and more than half of Republicans believe that the US should be a Christian nation. Vivek Ramaswamy has made the restoration of faith central to his campaign, as did Mike Pence before he dropped out of the race.
Immigration, however, is a major bulwark—perhaps the major bulwark—against secularization.
Immigrants per se aren’t any more religious than Americans born here, even though many hail from deeply religious nations. This could be because the U.S. remains unusually religious for a country with its level of economic development, because people with strong attachments to a religious community are less likely to migrate, or because moving from one country to another can disrupt religious habits.
But religion plays an outsized role in the lives of certain immigrant groups and their families. For example, while the religiosity of Latino Americans (two-thirds of whom were born in the U.S.) may be ebbing somewhat, Latinos are still more religious on average than others, which means that as the Latino population swells through new waves of immigration or higher fertility rates, it will offset religious losses elsewhere.
Churches, temples, and mosques serving immigrant communities are among the most vibrant centers of worship in the nation, offering new Americans powerful religious experiences alongside essential social support. Were it not for migration from Latin America, U.S. Catholicism would be far weaker than it is: the Church, reeling from membership declines stemming from sexual abuse cases, has found new life in the South and West by ministering to large Latino populations. Immigrants are also reviving evangelical faith traditions like Pentecostalism.
Mr. Ramaswamy exemplifies the religiosity that can be found in many immigrant households: his Indian parents raised their American-born son a devout Hindu. As a group, Indian Americans lean strongly Democratic, making Mr. Ramaswamy’s politics an outlier, but an added bonus of migration for the right is that at least on social and moral issues, recent immigrants tend to have more traditional views (although this varies by country of origin, age, and education level.) The tension between such views and a surging progressive movement may help account for gains the GOP was able to eke out in many immigrant neighborhoods in 2020.
Economic prosperity is another conservative priority. (It’s a priority for liberals as well.) The evidence on this score is that immigration helps American workers more than it hurts them.