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Religion has played a crucial role in American immigration history as an institutional resource for migrants' social adaptation, as a map of meaning for interpreting immigration experiences, and as a continuous force for expanding the national ideal of pluralism. To explain these processes the editors of this volume brought together the perspectives of leading scholars of migration and religion. The resulting essays present salient patterns in American immigrants' religious lives, past and present. In comparing the religious experiences of Mexicans and Italians, Japanese and Koreans, Eastern European Jews and Arab Muslims, and African Americans and Haitians, the book clarifies how such processes as incorporation into existing religions, introduction of new faiths, conversion, and diversification have contributed to America's extraordinary religious diversity and add a comprehensive religious dimension to our understanding of America as a nation of immigrants.

Albert J. Raboteau is Professor of Religion at Princeton University and the author of Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South and Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans.

Richard Alba is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at City University of New York and is the author of many books, including (with Victor Nee) Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration and Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America.

Josh DeWind is Director of the International Migration Program of the Social Science Research Council. He is the co-editor of The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience.