(Photo of mosque alongside church in Birmingham, England, by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
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Who could forget the horrors of September 2015, when thousands of desperate people put their lives in danger in an effort to get to Europe? The picture of Aylan Kurdi, one of the little boys who didn’t make it, touched millions of hearts.
I wrote last year about the traumas many of them had already experienced before they arrived. Now, new research from US-based Pew Research Center looks ahead to the implications of this sudden mass migration. What will the religious landscape of European countries look like in thirty years’ time, when the newly arrived people have settled and their children and grandchildren are part of our communities?
First, the caveats:
Pew are very clear that their research offers projections, and not predictions. Demographic forecasting is an art as well as a science, but it’s important to note that Pew had already published religious demography projections and then felt the need to change them after the mass migration of 2015. The refugee crisis changed the picture significantly.
The data they published this week drew from population statistics from September 2016, and extrapolated using assumptions about age and family size. Their analysis also makes some important points about the asylum process, and Pew have assumed that nearly a million Muslims who arrived in Europe in the last couple of years will not have their application for asylum approved, on the basis of past approval rates.
There will be more Muslims
Pew found that Muslims currently living in Europe are generally slightly younger than the average host populations – by 13 years, on average – and that they usually have one more child per family. We know that religious identity is transmitted primarily from parent to child which, along with other factors, means that it is reasonable to assume that there will be higher proportions of Muslims in most European countries by 2050. This is particularly likely in countries with younger Muslim populations and the largest families, including Italy, France and Belgium.
Pew have calculated three scenarios, based on high, medium and zero migration from this point. Even if there were no more migration into Europe at all, the Muslim population would rise from 4.9% (as it is now) to 7.4% by 2050, according to Pew. Under the ‘medium’ scenario, which assumes all refugee arrivals would stop but that immigration based on other reasons would continue, Pew suggest that Muslims could form 11.2% of the European population by 2050. And in the ‘high’ scenario, which allows for increased refugee arrivals, we might see 14% of Europe’s population identifying as Muslim by 2050.
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