【英语国际】报告显示美国为全球最大移民目的地

The U.S. is the top destination for the world's migrating Christians and Buddhists, as well as those with no particular religious affiliation, including atheists and agnostics, a new study showed.

The pattern is among the revelations in a map of religious migration across the globe released on Thursday by the Pew Research Center.

The map also shows that Europe has more Christian immigrants than Muslim immigrants. Millions of Muslims are on the move, mostly to other Muslim countries.

The study examined the religious identities of people living a year or longer in a country other than the one in which they were born as of 2010. It used world-wide census and United Nations data to determine the results.

While religious persecution and escape from violent conflict can be factors in migration, the single-largest driver is economic opportunity, immigration experts say. Still, people bring their faith with them when they move, said Phillip Connor, a Pew researcher and lead researcher of the study.

'Immigration changes societies. It changes the religious landscape,' Mr. Connor said. He noted that at one time the U.S. was mostly Protestant but that today it is only about half Protestant.

Christians, 33% of the world's population, make up nearly half of the world's 214 million living migrants, the study shows. Christian migration is largely driven by migration from Latin America to the U.S. Of the 43 million foreign-born people living in the U.S., nearly three quarters are Christian.

Russia, with 12 million immigrants, is the second-most-popular destination for immigrants, followed by Germany, with more than 10 million immigrants. Saudi Arabia and Canada were next, each attracting just over 7 million immigrants.

Mexico is the largest country of origin of Christian migrants, most of them now living in the U.S., the report says. The U.S. has received more than 12 million mostly Christian immigrants from Mexico alone, it says.

Despite the concerns of some in Europe over a rise in Muslim immigration, the study says that Christian immigrants outnumber Muslim immigrants in the 27 countries of the European Union. Around 26 million Christian immigrants make up 56% of the immigrant population of the EU nations; Muslim immigrants make up 27%, with 13 million foreign-born Muslims living in the EU. When migration from one EU country to another is excluded, the percentages are closer, but Christian immigrants still outnumber Muslim immigrants 13 million to 12 million, the study says.

Muslims are the second-largest group of international migrants, making up 60 million, or 27%, of the world's migrants. Many of them have migrated from India, Pakistan, Indonesia and the Philippines to Saudi Arabia. The Palestinian territories are the largest single source of Muslim migrants, with 5.7 million Palestinians exiting the region for other countries.

The massive migration of foreign-born workers to Persian Gulf countries has also injected some religious diversity into overwhelmingly Muslim countries, according to the report. There are more than 2 million Christian immigrants in six Gulf countries, as well as 1.4 million Hindu immigrants and half a million Buddhist immigrants.

Population projections show Gulf countries are expected to remain majority Muslim, but 'if the pace of immigration to the region continues, some [Gulf] states…may see dramatic changes in the religious composition of their societies,' the Pew report says.

Hindus tend to stay put, making up only 5% of the world's migrants but 10% to 15% of the global population. When they do move, they go to India, followed by the U.S.

No religious group has a higher level of migration than Jews, the study found. Although Jews make up only a sliver of the world population─less than 1%─and just 2% of the migrant population, a quarter of all living Jews today have left the country of their birth to live somewhere else. By contrast, just 5% of living Christians and 4% of Muslims have migrated to other countries, the study says.

Most of the 3.6 million Jewish migrants left Europe, and the overwhelming majority of those─3 million─ended up in Israel, according to the report.

据一项新的研究显示，美国是全球基督教、佛教以及包括无神论者和不可知论者在内的非宗教人士的第一大移民目的地。

相关阅读尽管欧洲有人担心穆斯林移民的增加，但报告显示，在欧盟27个成员国中，基督教移民人数超过了穆斯林移民。在欧盟国家中，约有2,600万基督教移民，占了欧盟移民总数的56%；而穆斯林移民占了27%，欧盟国家目前有1,300万外国出生的穆斯林教徒。研究说，在排除一个欧盟国家向另外一个欧盟国家的移民后，基督教移民和穆斯林移民所占的比重更加接近，但基督教移民仍比穆斯林移民多，前者为1,300万，后者为1,200万。

穆斯林教徒是国际移民中的第二大群体，有6,000万人，占了全球移民总数的27%。其中很多人从印度、巴基斯坦、印度尼西亚和菲律宾移民到沙特阿拉伯。巴勒斯坦地区则是穆斯林移民的最大来源地，有570万巴勒斯坦人从该地区移民到其他国家。

据报告显示，外国出生的工人大规模移民至波斯湾国家，这也给这些以穆斯林为主的国家注入了一些宗教多样性。在六个海湾国家中，有200多万基督教移民、140万印度教移民和50万佛教移民。

皮尤的报告说，人口预测显示，预计海湾国家将保持以穆斯林为主的状态，但如果该地区的外来移民继续以这样的速度增长下去，一些海湾国家社会的宗教构成则可能出现剧变。

印度教徒往往不喜欢迁移，仅占了全球移民总数的5%，但其占全球人口的比重为10%至15%。当印度教徒移民时，他们会移民到印度，其次是美国。

研究发现，在全部宗教群体中，犹太人移民比例最高。尽管犹太人仅占全球人口的不到1%，并且只占移民人口的2%，全部在世的犹太人中有四分之一目前已经离开自己的出生国，居住在别的地方。研究说，相比之下，只有5%的在世基督教徒和4%的穆斯林教徒移民到了其他国家。

据报告说，360万的犹太移民中大部分人离开了欧洲，而其中绝大多数（300万）最后居住在以色列。