The Effects of Religion on the Immigration Process in the USA: An Experiment

Abstract

This paper seeks to present how people's attitudes change according to the religion of immigrants and how this affects the immigrants' citizenship process in the USA. In general, immigration is a controversial issue, for that reason people may conceal their real thoughts and have a tendency to give the socially accepted answers. For that reason, in this paper the list experiment method is used to get the real opinions of people. Results indicate that, people in fact conceal their real thoughts in response to direct survey questions. In addition, the results show that Americans are generally concerned about immigration. However, when it is compared to Muslim and Christian immigrants, people are more likely to support granting citizenship to a Christian immigrant compared to a Muslim immigrant. The other most important finding is that being against Muslim immigrants is considered more acceptable. In other words, people may feel pressure to say that they do not support Muslim immigration, for that reason when it is asked directly, some people (more than 10%) automatically say that they are against Muslim immigrants compared to the findings in the list experiment.