Faith and Assimilation: Italian Immigrants in the U.S.

How do ethnic religious organizations influence immigrants’ assimilation? This paper offers the first systematic answer to this question by focusing on Italian Catholic churches in the US between 1890 and 1920, when four million Italians moved to America, and anti-Catholic sentiments were widespread. We digitize and assemble novel data from the Catholic directories, and exploit variation in the timing of arrival of Italian Catholic churches across US counties. We obtain three main results. First, Italian churches reduced the social assimilation of Italian immigrants, lowering intermarriage, residential integration, and naturalization rates. Second, the ethnic content of names chosen by Italian parents for their US born children suggests that churches reduced the vertical transmission of culture across generations, likely due to higher horizontal socialization within the Italian enclave. Third, despite the reduction in Italians' social assimilation, Italian churches had ambiguous effects on immigrants' economic outcomes, and raised children's literacy and ability to speak English. We provide evidence that increased coordination within the Italian community and natives’ backlash are plausible pathways for our results. We also identify patterns of selective migration of Italians following church entries, which, however, are quantitatively small and cannot explain our findings.