Transatlantic Trends Immigration Report

Posted on February 4, 2011 by Clive D. Field

Britons emerge as one of the most sceptical of western nations when it comes to immigration, according to the third annual Transatlantic Trends: Immigration report, which was published in Washington DC on 3 February.

65% of us see immigration as more of a problem than an opportunity, 70% think the government is doing a poor job at managing the issue, and 63% say that immigration policy may affect the way we vote.

Transatlantic Trends: Immigration is a project of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Compagnia di San Paolo, and the Barrow Cadbury Trust, with additional support from the Fundacion BBVA.

The key findings and topline data for the 2010 study will be found at, respectively:

http://www.gmfus.org/trends/immigration/doc/TTI2010_English_Key.pdf

http://www.gmfus.org/trends/immigration/doc/TTI2010_English_Top.pdf

Fieldwork was conducted in Great Britain (by ICM between 27 August and 9 September 2010) and in France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, the United States and Canada. 1,003 Britons aged 18 and over were interviewed by telephone.

The principal interest of the 2010 survey to BRIN users lies in two questions on attitudes to the integration of Muslim immigrants. These were only posed to a half-sample (n = 496 in Britain).

A slight majority (53%) of Britons considered that Muslim immigrants were integrating poorly into British society, 16% more than believed them to be integrating well. 10% could not say one way or the other.

The other half-sample was asked about the integration of immigrants in general. 52% of Britons said that they were integrating badly and 43% well, perhaps suggesting that Muslims were likewise to the front of mind in their replies.

Those holding that Muslim immigrants were poorly integrated were more numerous in Britain than in the United States (40%), Canada (44%), Italy (49%) and France (51%) but less than in The Netherlands (56%), Germany (67%) and Spain (70%).

Views were more favourable about the integration of the children of Muslim immigrants who had been born in Britain. 59% of Britons thought they had integrated well, 30% badly, with 11% uncertain.

Canada (66%) was most positive about the integration of the Muslim second generation, followed by the United States (62%) and Italy (60%). The other four European countries had lower figures than Britain, with 57% of Germans actually stating that the children of Muslim immigrants had integrated poorly.

A more extensive, but different, set of questions about Muslim immigrants was asked in the first Transatlantic Trends: Immigration survey in 2008, the topline data for which are available at:

http://www.gmfus.org/trends/immigration/doc/TTI_2008_Topline.pdf

The 2010 study also enquired into self-assessed religiosity. This question was put to the full sample. In reply, 10% of Britons described themselves as very religious, 42% as somewhat religious and 47% as not religious at all.

The proportion claiming not to be religious was higher in Britain than in any of the other countries surveyed. In descending order, the statistics were: The Netherlands (46%), France (43%), Germany (40%), Spain (35%), Canada (34%), and the United States and Italy (16% each).

This echoes the finding of a recent Gallup Poll which placed the United Kingdom 109th in a list of 114 countries in the importance attached by its citizens to religion in their daily lives. See further:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=520

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Future of the Global Muslim Population

Posted on January 28, 2011 by Clive D. Field

The long-awaited Pew report on The Future of the Global Muslim Population: Projections for 2010-2030 was eventually published yesterday by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life.

The Forum, based in Washington DC, is a non-partisan organization delivering timely and impartial information on issues at the intersection of religion and public affairs. It is an initiative of the Pew Research Center, financed by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

This report on Muslim population is part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project, jointly funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation.

The next documents in the series will be on the number of Christians (to be published later this year) and (in 2012) projections for the future growth of Christianity and other world faiths and of the religiously unaffiliated.

The study of Muslim populations covers 232 countries and territories (including the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man), so it is obviously not going to be possible to summarize it succinctly here. Rather, we shall concentrate on the UK data.

Estimates (the medium of three scenarios) of the number of self-identifying Muslims are provided for 1990, 2000, 2010, 2020 and 2030.

Projected figures for each country derive from the application of the well-established cohort-component method to the best available data on fertility, mortality and migration rates, and on related factors such as education, economic well-being and birth control.

The principal sources of the UK information are stated in Appendix B as: ‘1990 estimate based on World Religion Database; 2000 estimate based on 2001 Census; 2010, 2020 and 2030 projections carried out by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis based on the 2001 Census’ (p. 202).

The Institute referred to is located in Laxenburg, Austria, and a number of scholars from it are listed in Appendix C as consultants in respect of the UK: Bilal Barakat, Anne Goujon, Samir KC, Vegard Skirbekk and Marcin Stonawski. Other advisers on the UK were Erik Kaufmann (England) and Erling Lundevaller (Sweden).

The overall size of the UK Muslim population is estimated at 1,172,000 in 1990 (equivalent to 2.0% of all citizens) and 1,590,000 in 2000 (2.7%). The former figure seems somewhat high but is not drastically out of line with other estimates (largely ethnically-derived), while the latter is from the 2001 census, the first in Britain to include a question on religious profession.

The Pew estimate for 2010 is 2,869,000 (4.6% of the UK population). This has been arrived at through the cohort-component method (p. 174). As BRIN noted when this figure was given a preliminary airing by Pew on 16 September last (http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=598), it seems a little inflated.

A subsequent BRIN calculation based on the Integrated Household Survey for 2009-10, which interviewed 442,000 individuals in Britain, suggested that there are roughly 2,520,000 Muslims at present (see http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=603).

For a more definitive answer, we shall obviously have to await the results from this year’s census, which will be taken on 27 March, and will again run a (voluntary) question about religious affiliation.

Clearly, if Pew’s 2010 figure is somewhat inflated, this will presumably have impacted on its projections for 2020 and 2030, which could be unduly high. They are, respectively, 4,231,000 (6.5% of the population) and 5,567,000 (8.2%).

The projected UK percentage for 2030 is lower than for France (10.3%), Belgium (10.2%), Sweden (9.9%), Austria (9.3%) and the Western European average (8.6%), but higher than in Switzerland (8.1%), The Netherlands (7.8%), Germany (7.1%), Italy (5.4%) and Spain (3.7%).  

The anticipated rise in the number of UK Muslims between 2010 and 2030 is thus 94%, compared with 145% between 1990 and 2010. Despite this lessening in the rate of growth, the projected UK increase for 2010-30 is still almost three times the global and European figures (35% and 32% respectively).

One of the factors behind the expansion in the Muslim community relative to the non-Muslim population is the higher fertility of the former (3.0 children per woman in the UK in 2005-10) than the latter (1.8).

Although Muslim fertility is declining, and the gap on non-Muslims is narrowing, it is still expected to be 0.8 children per woman in 2025-30 compared with 1.2 in 2005-10.

Greater fertility is linked to the younger age profile of Muslims, meaning that they are disproportionately already in or entering the prime reproductive years (ages 15-29).

Another reason for Muslim growth in the UK is net migration. The net inflow of Muslim immigrants in 2010 is estimated by Pew at 64,000, representing 28% of all immigrants to the UK in the year. There were 70,000 in Spain, 66,000 in France and 60,000 in Italy.

However, the five-year projected Muslim net migration into the UK is set to fall, according to Pew, from 312,000 in 2010-15 to 274,000 in 2025-30.  

No allowance seems to have been made for conversions to Islam, about which we made a post recently (http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=813). Pew’s working hypothesis is that ‘future conversions into Islam will roughly equal conversions away from Islam’ (p. 166).

Needless to say, projections such as these could be overturned in the event of unanticipated changes in national or global social, economic or political conditions. Therefore, they should be treated with some discretion.

The 221-page report is available in both hypertext and PDF formats, alongside an interactive map and sortable data tables, thereby providing a truly flexible online resource. All these components can be accessed by following the links at the executive summary page:

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1872/muslim-population-projections-worldwide-fast-growth

To view the report alone as a PDF file, go to:

http://features.pewforum.org/FutureGlobalMuslimPopulation-WebPDF.pdf

Pew’s research will inevitably fuel the debates about immigration and Islamophobia in the UK. Early off the starting-block is the article in today’s Daily Mail which claims that by 2030 ‘Britain would have more Muslims than Kuwait and close to the number found in America, even though five times as many people live there’. See:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1351251/Number-British-Muslims-double-5-5m-20-years.html

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Reflections on Surveying Religion Online: Perils and Promise?

Posted on May 11, 2010 by Gladys Ganiel

by Gladys Ganiel, Trinity College Dublin at Belfast.

I presented the results of my surveys of religion on the island of Ireland this weekend at the annual conference of the Sociological Association of Ireland (May 7-9, 2010 at Queen’s University in Belfast). All three of the papers presented were about religion, and all three utilized quantitative data of some sort.

Prof. Tom Inglis of University College Dublin, one of the leading sociologists of religion in Ireland, commented that he is increasingly frustrated with the perils of survey questions when it comes to asking people about their faith.

Survey questions about religion often ask people if they believe in God, heaven, hell, sin, etc.; or to quantify the frequency of their religious practice. These measures have been important for helping sociologists to chart the ‘decline’ of religion in the West. But as Inglis pointed out, such questions do little to give us in-depth understanding of how people think about ‘meaning of life’ questions.

Supplemental qualitative interviewing is often a good method for complementing religious survey results with more nuanced perspectives.

But is it possible to include a built-in qualitative component in quantitative surveys of religion? I have experimented with this in my current research on religion in Ireland. This involved developing online surveys for faith leaders and laypeople, which included a range of conventional multiple choice/tick box questions, coupled with open ended questions where people had the opportunity to ‘write in’ responses to amplify their responses or make entirely new points.

The online data-gathering method provided people with the time and space, if they were inclined, to type thoughtful and sometimes lengthy responses. Commenting on these surveys, Prof. John Brewer of the University of Aberdeen highlighted the importance of these ‘free text spaces’:

“…the resulting fervour to write comments in free text spaces gives us a wealth of qualitative data that surveys of any kind do not normally disclose. Let me suggest that the free text will end up as important as the statistics for this survey.” (Click here to read further.)

For example, the survey questions focused on religious approaches to diversity/immigration, reconciliation and ecumenism. These are topics about which there are few agreed definitions. So the open ended questions provided people with the opportunity to define reconciliation and ecumenism for themselves – or to tell us that they thought that these issues weren’t all that important!

The blending of the quantitative and the qualitative within the survey format may not be possible in all large-scale surveys of religion. But I think that it is a promising way forward, especially when used in small-scale, online surveys on religious topics. For example, my surveys of religion in Ireland received responses from more than 700 faith leaders and 900 laypeople – far more than I would have had time or opportunity to interview.

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