David J. Bier
Some members of Congress have recently endorsed banning Muslim immigration on the grounds that Muslim immigrants supposedly have illiberal attitudes and do not assimilate—sometimes citing polls of Muslims around the world. I have previously described how US Muslims are the most liberal Muslims in the world and are becoming more so over time.
But there is another issue with polls of Muslims, even in the United States: they significantly understate the extent of immigrant assimilation because so many Muslim immigrants leave Islam. According to the Pew Research Center’s 2023–2024 Religious Landscape Study, nearly one in four people raised Muslim leave Islam. This biases polls against showing how the opinions of these immigrants and their descendants change over time. Indeed, leaving Islam is a form of assimilation into the broader society.
As an illustration of the issue, here is one question from Pew’s survey on whether homosexuality should be accepted. It shows that Muslims who were raised Muslim disapproved of homosexuality by 21 points more than they approved of it. Net approval among all Muslims, including converts, was negative 14 points. But among all individuals raised Muslim, as many respondents approved as disapproved. That’s a 21 percentage point difference from Muslims who were raised Muslim.
The Pew poll allows us to compare responses over immigrant generations. As we would expect based on the opinions of Muslims abroad, first-generation Muslims are the most hostile toward homosexuality, with a net disapproval of 27 percentage points. But including ex-Muslim immigrants immediately drops that share by 14 percentage points. Among the second generation who were raised Muslim, a majority accepted homosexuality.
The sample size for Muslims in the poll is relatively small, so the specific results should be interpreted with appropriate caution, but the pattern broadly makes sense. Many Muslim immigrants come to the United States. The ones who leave Islam tend to be the most liberal and assimilated. This polling actually understates the extent of Muslim assimilation because it excludes the second-generation children of Muslim immigrants who were not raised Muslim themselves. We also should not infer that everyone who does not think homosexuality is acceptable believes in authoritarian measures to stop it.
Americans who were raised Muslim diverge sharply from people raised in Muslim countries. Looking at the Pew Research Center’s Spring 2019 Global Attitudes Survey and the Arab Barometer Survey from 2019 reveals a stark contrast between people raised in the United States and most other majority-Muslim countries. The highest level in any majority-Muslim country included in those surveys was 26 percent acceptance, compared with 48 percent in the United States.
This post cannot address every aspect of Muslim assimilation. We have previously discussed issues related to terrorism, crime, and other aspects of assimilation. But it is important to understand that Muslims do assimilate. In prior posts on this topic, I have shown how this pattern repeats on a variety of other issue areas—including support for violence against civilians, which Muslims are less supportive of than the general population.
It is worth emphasizing that most Muslim immigrants have come to the United States in just the last two decades, so the period for assimilation has been short, and an extraordinary convergence is already underway. We should be hopeful that these trends continue and that the Muslim liberalism advocated by my colleague, Mustafa Akyol, and other American Muslims radiates from the United States around the world.