Global Migration

The present era is not the first to see great trans-regional migrations; the Roman, Muslim, and Mongol empires all saw large-scale movements of people, as did the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the past 40 years, however, migration has gone global. Large numbers of people now move in all directions, temporarily and permanently, with sometimes startling religious consequences.

Sociologists have typically understood religion's role in transnational migration by using the “Ellis Island model”—named after the U.S. immigration station in New York harbor (1892–1954). European immigrants to the United States, the story goes, used religion as a way to adjust to their new surroundings. Swedish and Danish Lutherans, Dutch Calvinists, Scottish Presbyterians, and the like founded ethnic churches in the United States, which gave them a bit of the “old country” in the new. They kept their language and customs while getting used to their new country's ways. American Catholics similarly formed Irish, Italian, Croatian, Polish, and other national parishes, which offered services and support in their native tongues.

America's recent wave of immigrants may follow the same path, but with variations. Carolyn Chen, for example, showed how Taiwanese immigrants have become more religious in the United States than they were in their homeland. Various studies of new immigrant groups—among them Kerala Hindus, Mayan and Haitian Catholics, Korean Presbyterians, and Vietnamese Buddhists—show how people “become American” by reshaping their religious heritage to fit America's congregational norm. Religion aids assimilation but changes as it does so.

Ellis Island is not the only story, however. In an age of swift, cheap travel and instant telecommunications, migrants no longer need to live simply in one place; they can participate fully in religious life in two countries at once. Peggy Levitt's “transnational villagers” do precisely that, taking part equally in their parishes in Boston and the Dominican Republic. African migrants in Europe and the United States similarly work transnationally, sending missions, resources, and financial support in both directions. In such cases, religions help people maintain a bilocal residence, allowing them to have two “homes” simultaneously.

Nor do today's migrants always integrate to their new surroundings. They can use religion to isolate themselves from their host countries and from each other. Greg Smith's studies of East London, for example, show a veritable cacophony of immigrant religious groups, few of which interact. Officially, multicultural Britain, it seems, does not require assimilation to any simple norm.

[Page 457]Still, all this speaks to a particular form of migration: from the developing world to the United States and Europe. Today's migration is more complex. For example, it is not unusual to find an Arab born in France of Egyptian refugee parents, educated in the United States, and now working in Malaysia after stints in Berlin, Dubai, and Hong Kong. Olivier Roy calls such migrants “deterritorialized elites” and argues that religion can become, for them, a primary identity. This is not, to him, the only source of radical Islam, but it is one such source. Transnational Pentecostalism can similarly become a stronger identity than national citizenship for some whose lives carry them, for example, from Nigeria to Brazil and then to Canada, South Africa, and Zaire. Here, religion does not just aid the transition between national identities, it becomes a postnational master identity in its own right.

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