One arresting feature of the immigration debate that fueled a thousand op-eds and a small library of books over the last decade—not to mention various congressional panels, think-tank reports, and Sunday supplements—was its apparent lack of connection with any significant real-world consequences. No matter what anyone said, pro or con, immigration continued at a record pace, so that by the end of the 1990s more immigrants had been admitted to the United States than during any previous decade in the nation's history.

And no matter how many were coming in, one could count on a screed every few months by immigration advocates like George Anderson in the Jesuit magazine America, such as the cover story of July17–24, 1999, titled "Keeping the Immigrant Out." The cover illustration showed the Statue of Liberty surrounded by a barrier, denying entry to a little family in a rowboat. That year, as it happened, only 646,568 legal immigrants were admitted, plus refugees, asylees, and illegal immigrants, for a total approaching if not exceeding one million.

Given these circumstances, it's easy to dismiss the entire debate as political theater. Still, beneath all the posturing, important matters are at stake. "Will today's immigrant population become the first in American history that fails to assimilate?" The question has been moved to the front burner again by Samuel (The Clash of Civilizations) Huntington and his new book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity (Simon & Schuster), already the subject of fierce controversy. (Keep an eye out for Timothy Shah's review forthcoming in B&C.) But this is only the latest entry in an ongoing conversation. John Miller, for example, a reporter for National Review, set out to answer the same question in his 1998 book, The Unmaking of Americans: How Multiculturalism Has Undermined America's Assimilation Ethic (Free Press).

Miller's own argument is pro-immigration and pro-assimilation. He strongly rejects the nativism of restrictionists such as Peter Brimelow and Chilton Williamson, who deplore the loss of a "white" America. But the bulk of his book is directed against fashionable leftish critiques of assimilation. To the extent that such attitudes are influential, Miller worries, immigration is in danger of becoming a liability rather than a source of national vitality. Hence his advocacy of an updated version of the "Americanization" movement that brought immigrants and their children into the mainstream early in the 20th century.

Strangely, though, as he considers the prospects for assimilation of the current wave of immigrants, Miller says virtually nothing about religion. Is it a positive force for assimilation? Negative? Neutral? He doesn't say. Indeed, for the most part Miller writes as if religion was not even a factor in human affairs. When he refers to the "agenda" of 19th-century nativists, you would never guess that anti-Catholicism was frequently at the top of their list. Nor would you learn from his account of the earlier wave of immigration how Catholics in America had their own very effective agent of Americanization: the Catholic subculture.

But this is not an omission unique to Miller, whose book in fact has much to offer. On the contrary, in largely ignoring the religious dimension of the New Immigration, Miller is typical. As the Social Science Research Council put it in outlining the goals of its Pew-funded Religion, Immigration and Civic Life project initiated in 1999, "consideration of the role of religion in immigrant incorporation has been strikingly limited in contemporary scholarship." And therein lies a tale.

One of the most notable features of the New Immigration—as Philip Jenkins has observed, in these pages and elsewhere—is its strongly Christian character. Mexican Americans, the largest group in the new wave, have their origins in a largely Catholic culture, although the political culture of Mexico has been anticlerical for decades. In the United States, many new arrivals have been attracted to Protestant groups, especially but not exclusively of the Pentecostal variety. At the same time, in response to such defections, the Catholic church in the United States is intensifying its already substantial outreach to immigrants from Mexico and other Hispanics.

And what of the new Asian immigrants? Among Chinese Americans, the largest Asian American group, "Christian churches have evidently become the predominant religious institutions," writes Fenggang Yang in Chinese Christians in America: Conversion, Assimilation, and Adhesive Identities (Penn State, 1999). Filipinos, the second largest Asian American group, are intensely Catholic, though there is also noticeable growth among Pentecostal and evangelical groups. Korean Americans are particularly active, with levels of church attendance greatly exceeding the American average. And many younger Asian American Protestants are forming pan-Asian congregations.

African immigrants? Mostly Christian, we can assume, though the data is scarce. And Arab Americans are by no means automatically Muslims; many are immigrants from the beleaguered Christian communities of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Many scholars are still operating with the secularist assumptions under which they were trained. For them, religion simply isn't relevant. Others—including many in ethnic studies—are simply hostile to religion in general and especially to Christianity. In practice, the results may be the same. I recently read a book about Filipino Americans that performed the astonishing feat of almost entirely ignoring the place of Christianity in their lives.

There are some signs of progress. Several valuable collections of essays have appeared in recent years—see for example Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration, edited by R. Stephen Warner and Judith G. Wittner (Temple, 1998)—and more are on the way. Some of these are the product of Pew-sponsored programs such as the SSRC project mentioned above. What it means to be both Christian and American is a more complicated matter than many would have us believe.

It behooves all parties to look with an unprejudiced eye—neither demonizing nor sentimentalizing—on the extraordinarily interesting social landscape that is the product of the most extensive immigration in American history. Whatever the precise contours of American society in the coming decades, it will be profoundly shaped by immigration—and by religion.

An earlier version of this piece appeared in The American Outlook.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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