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Nevertheless, a committee appointed by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has recommended that Germany begin to admit 50,000 "qualified" immigrants annually. Germany, like a number of European nations (and like Japan), has seen its birthrate drop to such an extent that demographic disaster looms on the horizon. The committee estimates that Germany's population will decline from 82 million today to 60 million in 2050, with the working population declining from 41 million to 26 million over the same span.

Just above the story from Germany, the Timesran a photo captioned "Rescue Off Italy":

The Italian Navy frigate Granatiere rescued 650 Kurdish migrants yesterday after they were stranded on a fishing boat in the Ionian Sea. Italy is a popular goal for such refugees, and the new center-right government of Silvio Berlusconi has pledged to fight such illegal immigration.

In Italy, it should be noted, the birth rate has dropped even more precipitously than it has in Germany. But a majority of Italians, like their German counterparts, fear that immigration will fundamentally alter the character of their nation.

Meanwhile, the United States has entered the twenty-first century after more than a decade of levels of immigration unprecedented even in the period at the beginning of the twentieth century, with legal immigration (including refugees) together with illegal immigration adding up to well over a million newcomers annually, year after year. On other occasions in this space we've noted the profound impact of the landmark Immigration Act of 1965, the long-term consequences of which we're only beginning to sort out. Much of the study of the impact of the immigration—and the never-ending debate about its benefits and costs—has focused rather narrowly on economics. Shrewd observers such as Charles Krauthammer and Nicholas Eberstadt have suggested that the continuing influx of immigrants will allow the United States to thrive economically in the coming decades while Europe and Japan struggle to overcome the effects of a steadily dwindling population. Other commentators have debated the cultural impact of immigration: are the so-called "new immigrants" assimilating much as their predecessors did a century ago, or is the United States in danger of becoming increasingly Balkanized?

Until recently, one important aspect of immigration's impact had been relatively neglected: the effects of the new immigration on religion in America. In part this can be attributed to the bias of scholars still in the grip of the secularization thesis, or otherwise hostile to or uninterested in religion, yet Christians were also slow to appreciate its significance. But that is no longer the case. We now have wide-ranging accounts such as Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration, edited by R. Stephen Warner and Judith G. Wittner (Temple University Press, 1998), as well as many studies focused on particular faith traditions or ethnic groups.

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July (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45