As some of you know, I occasionally write a column for the Deseret News. My recent one dropped right around the time of the Charlie Kirk shooting, so I doubt hardly anybody read it, but it actually has some interesting insights in regards to immigration and religiosity in the US. Among other things, I point out that in contrast to our earlier demographics, the current Latter-day Saints community has fewer immigrants in its ranks than many other traditions (we basically look like Protestants).

Sometimes with articles like this I send them a bajillion graphs and they (reasonably) only select one or two so that we don’t lose people, so here I’m posting a few others that didn’t make the cut. The ones left out make another important point that was, frankly, surprising to me and ran against some of my own assumptions: immigrants aren’t discernibly more religious than native-born Americans. I suspect that if we had fine-grained ethnicity information we’d find that for every very religious Somali immigrant we have a non-religious Chinese or Vietnamese immigrant. Additionally, it doesn’t look like it’s a matter of the immigrants becoming less religious in the US since when we look at how religious they were raised it is about the same as native-born US citizens.

So, contrary to what I thought before, immigration is not going to save US religion. The conventional Latter-day Saint wisdom I held growing up was that Mexican US immigration in particular would help provide more demographic ballast to the US Church, and that may have been true in the past, but as I mention in the article Mexico is just not that religious anymore. So while I am still in favor of immigration providing a demographic ballast for the US in general, I’m not seeing a lot of evidence that it will lead to a revitalization of the kind of child-having and reproducing family cultures that religion engenders.