Would Immigrants Look Different Under a Points System?
Simulating a Major Change in Policy
Recently, there have been rumblings again about a shift to a points-based immigration system similar to what Canada or Australia use. I’ve discussed such proposals before at length, and basically suggested that (1) rationalizing our immigration system into a points system is a good idea but, (2) current proposals to do so are very flawed.
But I’ve noticed an interesting trend lately: people who advocate for a points system seem to think it will reduce immigration by Muslims. This is a perplexing view because the proposed system, the RAISE Act, does not include any penalty points for being Muslim, and indeed most of its criteria are pretty facially neutral, more neutral even than I would think necessary or desirable.
So let’s do a little exercise. Let’s simulate the impact of the RAISE Act. It turns out to be fairly easy to get a very basic idea of what impact the RAISE Act might have.
Put plainly, the raise act would favor immigration of people who (1) are highly educated, (2) speak good English, (3) are in their 20s and 30s, (4) have high income.
We have good data on current immigrants by nationality and, although we don’t have data by religion for immigrants, we do have religion data by country. We can make a simplifying assumption that people immigrating to the US have the same religious mix as the country generally. In reality, this probably isn’t true; immigrants are probably somewhere between their country and the US’ religious makeup, but let’s use this simplifying assumption. In the end it doesn’t matter what assumption we use, as long as we assume that implementing the RAISE Act would not directly cause a change in the religious selection of immigrants from a given country.
Given that religion correlates with education, languages learned, and age in at least some countries and that the RAISE Act selects along those factors, this assumption does not precisely hold, but, again, we’re just doing a very basic first calculation here.
So we can approximate the religious makeup of current immigrants. Here’s what I estimate, alongside the US:
As you can see, for both immigrants and the current population, Christians are probably the strong majority of immigrants. However, while unaffiliateds are 2nd for the general population, they’re most likely 3rd for immigrants, with Muslims representing somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of immigrants. That estimate seems pretty high to me, but I haven’t found any glaring errors in my method. As you can see, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, and “Folk Religionists” are all over-represented among immigrants, while Christians, Jews, unaffiliateds, and “others” are under-represented. Again, plenty of margin of error here. And again, the margin of error doesn’t matter much for my core exercise, comparing the plausible impact of the RAISE Act on religious preferences of immigrants.
So how do we get at the religious preferences of post-RAISE Act immigrants? Well, we can start by looking at immigrants in the US. What immigrant groups are already biggest in the eligible categories? I use ACS data to identify the place of birth of individuals with masters degrees or higher, who speak English natively or “very well,” who earn at least $70,000, and who are between ages 22–35. Having all of these criteria would make a person a good candidate for RAISE Act admission.
There are 331,000 such individuals in the US right now who meet those qualifications. If we take the distribution of these points-qualifiers as an indicator of the distribution of RAISE Act immigrants, we can then apply the religious demographics of each of those origin countries to each group, multiply out by 600,000 (RAISE Act Green Card issuances), and, badabing badaboom, we’ve got an estimate of the religious mix of post-RAISE Act immigrants. Here it is:
As you can see, under the RAISE Act, the Christian share would fall dramatically. The Muslim share would also fall, but much less sharply, and it would remain far higher than the Muslim share of the general population. The unaffiliated, Buddhist, and other shares of immigration would all increase modestly, while the Hindu share of immigration would go waaaaaay up. We’ll talk more about why later.
But that’s only one way to estimate post-RAISE Act immigrants. That estimation implicitly assumes that historic U.S. immigration networks have some degree of structural continuity that the RAISE Act would leave undisturbed. We can also turn to foreign data. Here the data quality is poorer, but we can at least get the population share with a masters degree for most countries, as well as an estimate of English language proficiency. Using this data we can extremely roughly approximate the “RAISE-Act-Eligible” share of each country’s population. Multiply out by total population and we can see the geographic distribution around the world of RAISE-Act-Eligible people. Assume that distribution is replicated within the RAISE Act Green Card issuances, and use the same religious assumptions as earlier, and we can easily calculate the religious demographics of RAISE Act immigrants by a second method.
The major conclusions remain the same: Christians decline lots, Muslims decline less, Hindus, Buddhists, and unaffiliateds rise. This is a second, totally different method calibrated to totally different base data (except country-level religious composition), and it yields the same estimate.
Finally, we can fix the problem in that religious estimate: let’s assume that the true RAISE Act composition will be biased towards looking like the U.S. religious makeup; i.e. there is some degree of selection pressure for favoring Christians in immigrant-sending countries. My “final” estimate will simply be the average of these four estimates. Since the RAISE Act doesn’t replace all visas, it stands to reason that current immigration trends will not totally vanish, so the green bar is worth keeping in mind. Since migration may have religious selection pressures, the blue bar is worth keeping in mind. And since both methods of calculating the RAISE Act seem to have some merit, we’ll keep them in mind too, and we’ll weight them a bit heavier than the others as well.
But that’s just in terms of share of immigrants. What about total number? The RAISE Act also lowered the total number of Green Card issuances. What is the overall net effect on immigration for each religious group?
Hindus and “others” (especially Sikhs and Jains) stand to gain a very great deal, with a more modest gain for Jews. Immigration of the unaffiliated, meanwhile, would probably decline slightly. Larger declines would be in the offing for Buddhists and Christians, with the largest declines for Muslims and Folk Religionists.
The result is that, while Muslims would still represent a very large share of immigrants, they would indeed see one of the steepest falls in terms of their total immigration. However, the beneficiaries would not be Christians, who would have the next-biggest-decline, nor even very much Jews, but Hindus, Sikhs, and Jains.
If the objective of the RAISE Act is to privilege the immigrants of the Judeo-Christian heritage, or Christians specifically, it will fail dramatically; likewise, if the aim is to specifically target Muslims, it will fail as well.
Christians end up being one of the most disfavored groups under the RAISE Act, along with Muslims. Meanwhile, Hindus, Sikhs, and Jains are the big gainers. It’s not clear if this would bother the architects of the RAISE Act or not. I make no statement about the goodness or badness of any of this. But suffice it to say, the religious impacts of the RAISE Act do not fit any easy-to-explain narrative of discrimination along religious lines.
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I’m a native of Wilmore, Kentucky, a graduate of Transylvania University, and also the George Washington University’s Elliott School. My real job is as an economist at USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service, where I analyze and forecast cotton market conditions. I’m married to a kickass Kentucky woman named Ruth.
My posts are not endorsed by and do not in any way represent the opinions of the United States government or any branch, department, agency, or division of it. My writing represents exclusively my own opinions. I did not receive any financial support or remuneration from any party for this research.
