AMERICA’S CHURCHES are the most important way the country’s Latino immigrants enter society, says a new study.

The huge rise in immigration from south of the Rio Grande, much of it illegal, has become a central theme in American politics, especially among voters alarmed at the growth of a supposedly aloof non-English-speaking society within the United States.

But a research project by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, “Invisible No More: Mexican Migrant Civic Participation in the United States”, has found that immigrants tend to be civically and culturally active. The centre, a non-partisan think-tank established by Congress in 1968, pointed to churches as the primary means by which immigrants can “recognise each other as believers and … reaffirm their belonging to a community outside of their local groups. The church is converted into a space for collective action for organisation and civic action.” There are an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the US, according to the Department of Homeland Security, with 6 million of these from Mexico and well over 1 million from other Latin American countries. Total immigrants number more than 36 million. The US Census Bureau estimates that by 2050, a quarter of the US population – 100 million people – will be of Latino origin.

Latino Americans tend to be religiously active: 38 per cent volunteer work at a church, not necessarily a Catholic church. Although the majority of Latino migrants are Catholics, who typically attend Spanish-speaking parishes, a quarter of the rest are part of a rising tide of hispanophone Protestantism, much of it Pentecostal. As American Protestantism and Catholicism both take on a deeper Latino tinge, religious leaders are increasingly drawn into the immigration debate. And as faith takes on a political aspect, so popular identity becomes more religious. “There is a tendency”, says the report, “for religious identities to take on added meaning in the global context of accelerated migration.”