Religion and the New Immigrants 237
the study of transnational religious communities to other immigrant groups in Boston
(e.g., Irish, Brazilians, Gujarati Indians). For the past two years, I have been conduct-
ing research on religion and transnational ties among Mexican, Argentine, Chinese,
Vietnamese, and Guatemalans in Houston and their home communities, funded by
The Pew Charitable Trusts. Several of the Gateway Projects, described earlier, also have
transnational components.
While the technological advances of e-mail, fax, rapid telephone exchanges, videos,
and modern modes of travel have facilitated the rapidity and ease of maintaining
transnational ties, it is important to keep in mind that earlier, nineteenth-century im-
migrants were also transmigrants. As a number of scholars have documented (Bodnar
1985; Alexander 1987; Morawska 1989; Chan 1990; Wyman 1993; Gutierrez 1997;
Glick-Schiller 1999), seasonal migrants who came to the United States to work were a
major source of capital investment on their return. Steamships, telegraph, and postal
services made it possible to circulate between two societies (Rouse 1992; Glick-Schiller
1999). Remittances sent by immigrants in the United States to home communities were
frequently a major source of income for both families and local churches that depended
on the help of immigrants to survive (Bodnar 1985; Dolan 1985; Wyman 1993). Like-
wise, there were numerous organizational ties between churches in the United States
and in sending communities (Wyman 1993). It is important, therefore, in analyses
of transnational religious communities not to assume that the phenomenon is new.
Rather, the challenge is to specify the nature of the pathways that current transna-
tional ties take and their impact on religious institutions in both sending and receiving
countries.
FUTURE RESEARCH
The recently increasing number of studies that focus on religion and the new immi-
grants has established the fact that religious institutions are central in the lives of im-
migrants. In addition, these studies have indicated the roles that religion and religious
institutions play in helping immigrants to maintain their ethnoreligious identity while
at the same time adapting to American society. Simultaneously, research has focused on
challenges which established religious institutions face in incorporating immigrants,
many of them becoming multiethnic in the process. While religion is beginning to take
its place in the broader analysis of immigration, there are a number of directions on
which I think future research needs to focus.
As indicated earlier, research on new immigrants that was done prior to the 1990s
focused primarily on case studies of religion in specific ethnic or religious groups. These
studies were valuable in delineating the centrality of religion in the lives of these immi-
grant communities and describing the functions that religion served in the settlement
processes. The NEICP (Warner and Wittner 1998) and RENIR (Ebaugh and Chafetz
2000b) projects focused on comparisons of patterns among ethnoreligious groups. By
the time the Gateway Cities Projects were funded, literature existed on the major themes
that characterize immigrant religions and the conditions under which various patterns
seem to emerge. The major challenge in future projects is to move beyond idiosyn-
cratic cases and to continue comparative study across a number of ethnic and religious
groups, with the goal of furthering our understanding of the cultural, social, theologi-
cal, historical, and structural conditions that impact the settlement process. Hopefully,