Faith on the move

A new Pew Research Center study released yesterday, Faith on the Move, attempts to flesh out patterns of faith, origin and destination among international migrants, and piece together their interrelated roles in mobile societies.

The study assembles migration data on seven major groups: Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, adherents of other religions and the religiously unaffiliated, and lists the countries people have moved to and from.

The majority of the world’s migrants — 106 million people — are Christian. Muslims account for nearly 60 million, the second largest of the polled categories, followed by Hindus, Buddhists and Jews.

Jews, though just ahead of "adherents of other faiths" and "religiously unaffiliated" in terms of total numbers, represent the highest level of migration, percentage wise. The study reports that:

"About one-quarter of Jews alive today (25 percent) have left the country in which they were born and now live somewhere else. By contrast, just 5 percent of Christians, 4 percent or Muslims and less than 3 percent of members of other religious groups have migrated across international borders."

So, where are the majority of these religiously-inclined people coming from? About one third of the total migrant population, the largest single-share, have come from Asia-Pacific region (where about one fifth of all international migrants have moved to), followed by Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean. Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East-North Africa region, contribute roughly 10 percent of all international religious migrants respectively.