Religion has played a crucial role in American immigration history as an institutional resource for migrants' social adaptation, as a map of meaning for interpreting immigration experiences, and as a continuous force for expanding the national ideal of pluralism. To explain these processes the editors of this volume brought together the perspectives of leading scholars of migration and religion. The resulting essays present salient patterns in American immigrants' religious lives, past and present. In comparing the religious experiences of Mexicans and Italians, Japanese and Koreans, Eastern European Jews and Arab Muslims, and African Americans and Haitians, the book clarifies how such processes as incorporation into existing religions, introduction of new faiths, conversion, and diversification have contributed to America's extraordinary religious diversity and add a comprehensive religious dimension to our understanding of America as a nation of immigrants.

Richard Alba is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at City University of New York and is the author of many books, including (with Victor Nee) Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration and Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America.

Richard Alba is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center CUNY and author of many books including Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration and Immigration and Religion in America: Comparative and Historical Perspectives.

Albert J. Raboteau is Professor of Religion at Princeton University and the author of Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South and Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans.

Josh DeWind is the Director of the International Migration Program of the Social Science Research Council. He is the co-editor of The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience.

"This path-breaking volume makes a major contribution to our understanding of immigrant religion in America. By adopting a comparative design that examines immigrant groups today and in the past, this well-focused and highly readable collection sheds a bright new light on—and provides often surprising insights into—the way religion has operated as belief system, institution, and community for immigrants both then and now."

"This book is particularly valuable for its comparative, historical perspective. It reminds us that today's developments have deep roots and that despite differences, there is much that unites the Asian American and Latino experience. An important contribution to the burgeoning literature on religion and immigration."

“This volume benefits from the rigorous format designed by its distinguished editors. What might initially appear to be an overly rigid structure emerges as a format that enables rich and innovative comparisons of a vast diversity of very singular case studies that are only rarely juxtaposed.”