Time in Pew Softens Immigration View?

That headline is a slight oversimplification of a paper in the upcoming edition of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. Based on a 2006 poll, the paper suggests that – all other things being equal – the more often people say they attend worship services, the more likely they will have a liberal attitude toward illegal immigrants.

The paper's title is " 'And Who Is My Neighbor?' Religion and Immigration Policy Attitudes" and the author is Benjamin Knoll, a political science graduate student at the University of Iowa. He's slicing and dicing the results of a 2006 poll, taken by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and the Pew Hispanic Center, that assessed public opinion on immigration-related questions.

Let's get rid of the caveats up front: The survey was national, but heavily weighted toward the populations of five metropolitan areas: Chicago, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Raleigh-Durham, and Washington, D.C. And the effects that Knoll says he identifies are modest. But that doesn't mean they aren't interesting.

His analysis paddles upstream from what one might expect. Many, many surveys indicate that religious service attendance strongly correlates with political party affiliation -- people are more likely to be Republican as self-report of attendance rises. And the base of the GOP is supposed to be pretty hard-line about immigration. Remember how John McCain had to answer attacks during the Republican primaries last year accusing him of favoring "amnesty"?

The 2006 Pew survey asked people what policy response they favored toward immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally. The national breakdown:

Fifty-three percent said the immigrants should be forced to go back home. That group split almost evenly on the question of whether deportation should be immediate or whether there should be a temporary worker status. Forty percent were in favor of letting the immigrants stay. And almost all of that group favored some process that could lead to a permanent resident status.

Most of the breakdowns run pretty much as you'd expect: Democrats (though not African Americans), the more highly educated, younger people, and those with higher incomes were more likely to support the more open policies. But the original Pew report did not crunch the numbers about how religious adherence – as measured by how often someone says he or she says they attend worship services – might affect opinions. So that's what Kroll did.

In his paper, Knoll says:

"All else being equal, the likelihood of supporting a guest-worker or legalization proposal over an immediate deportation option and for supporting an eventual legalization policy over a guest-worker or immediate deportation policy increases by 7.3 percent and 5.2 percent, respectively, as individuals move from never attending worship services to attending more than once per week. While this is not an overwhelming magnitude, it is comparable to the average size of the effect of other important demographic determinants such as education (6.1 percent) or age (10.1 percent)."

I asked him if that weren't counterintuitive, given the apparent power of the issue as a GOP motivator. Knoll went back and crunched more numbers just for me:

"Even among Republicans, those who attend church more often have more liberal immigration policy preferences than those who attend less often. (I ran a few quick numbers: 42 percent of Republicans who never go to church prefer an immediate deportation option and 23 percent prefer an earned citizenship option. On the other hand, only 29 percent of Republicans who go to church more than once a week prefer deportation compared to 35 percent who favor an earned citizenship program."

What makes that bit of analysis so interesting is that Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to say they attend services at least weekly. And as the Pew folks say elsewhere: "People who regularly attend worship services and say religion is important in their lives are much more likely to identify as conservative."

So why would the degree of religious participation matter on this issue?

Knoll has some theories. His most interesting, I think, is that people who attend more often are more likely to pay some heed to the leadership of their faith tradition. And as he documented in his paper, by 2006 leaders from across the U.S. religious landscape (from the conservative Southern Baptist to the liberal Main Line, and perhaps most prominently, the Catholic bishops) had come out in favor of some kind of guest worker program, if not a process that could lead to permanent residency or citizenship.

Correlation is not causation. And I have my doubts about how strongly the exhortations of religious leaders would be able to jiggle the needle on this issue. But there's no question that the sacred texts of Judaism and Christianity have a lot to say about the treatment of strangers and sojourners in a land not their original.

I'll give Knoll the last word:

"This study provides evidence for the conclusion that, contrary to conventional wisdom, individual religiosity can sometimes lead to more liberal policy preferences. Religion and conservative public policies apparently do not always go hand in hand."