Religiosity and public support for deportation in the US

Secular democrats often believe that religious Americans are more exclusionary and conservative. If true, as the individual salience of religion increases, so should individual support for the deportation of undocumented migrants.

To find out if this was true, I went back to data I gathered with the help of YouGov in 2018, as part of a broader project funded by Human Rights Watch, among others, to map public attitudes towards human and civil rights in the US.

I focused on two questions in particular: “How important is religion in your daily life,” and, “To what extent do you support the deportation of undocumented immigrants from the US?” I also made use of questions about religious affiliation (Protestant, Catholic, etc.), along with a whole host of questions about respondents’ political preferences and behavior, their socio-economic status, demographic details, and perspectives on ideological themes, such as nativism, ethnocentrism, and more.

My findings surprised me. Yes, initial findings showed that higher religious salience was associated with greater support for deportation, as indicated in this table:

However, this relationship largely disappeared when I controlled for other factors. In the end, only one group — spiritual folks who did NOT identify with any particular faith tradition — conformed to the popular wisdom. For this group, which represented about 22% of my 2,000-person strong sample, greater religious salience was indeed associated with more exclusionary views. This was not true for Catholics, Protestants, atheists, or agnostics.

Here is the final visualization of the data:

X-axis: increasing levels of religious importance. Y-axis: predicted support for deportation. Finding: Only for respondents with no formal religious affiliation (“nothing in particular,” shown in black) does support rise with religious importance. For Protestants and Catholics, the slope is flat. Shaded areas represent 95% confidence intervals.

If you want to read the longer post, check out my research blog, available at: https://www.jamesron.org/post/james-ron-religious-salience-and-support-for-deportations-in-the-us.

For a more fully developed study that includes “born agains” as a faith category, see my article with Richard Wood, “How Faith Shapes Support for Deportation in the U.S.” on the website of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California: https://dornsife.usc.edu/iacs/2025/09/23/religion-deportation-james-ron/