Immigration Attitudes Among American Religious Groups

In this chapter, we utilize data from scholarly sources like the American National Election Studies, the General Social Surveys, the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, as well as important survey organizations that specialize in religion research, the Pew Research Center and the Public Religion Research Institute, to compare and contrast lay opinion across religious groups. We show that white evangelicals are the most opposed to evangelical reform of any religious group, while their Hispanic co-religionists are in the camp that most favors reform, with black evangelicals more or less in the middle. Although white evangelicals lead the mass opposition to progressive immigration policies among religious groups, white mainline Protestants and Anglo-Catholics are not far behind. This suggests that race and political factors may be more important than religion in forming immigration attitudes.