Pew Research Center came out this week with an updated estimate of the American Muslim population, which is sure to cause a stir on all sides of the issue.
The new numbers come in at 3.45 million Muslims living legally in the US in 2017. That represents only 1.1 percent of the US population but its up, by Pews estimates, from 3.31 million in 2016.
The US Muslim population grows by about 100,000 every year, according to the Pew study.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, says Pews estimates are way off, and that the true number is roughly double, in the 6 to 8 million range and that was more than two years ago.
Muslim advocacy groups such as the Council on American Islamic Relations routinely cite a span of 6 million to 8 million people in describing the size of Islam in America. That would be between 2 percent and 3 percent of the US population and make Muslims greater in number than Mormons or Jews, CAIR stated on its website in March 2015.
If CAIR, an offshoot of the extremist Muslim Brotherhood, is correct and there are at least 6 million Muslims living in the US, that would represent 2.4 percent of the total population and exceed the number of Jewish Americans by about a million.
The facts bear out that the higher a nations Muslim population, the more anti-Semitic attacks occur in that nation. France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the U.K. have all seen increasing numbers of hate crimes against Jews and Jewish properties since they began importing mass numbers of Muslim migrants. It has gotten so bad in France and Germany that many Jews have been quietly migrating out of those countries in recent years.
Both Pew and CAIR note that they are watching closely for the day when Islam surpasses Judaism as the second most populous religious group in America. CAIR, as stated above, thinks that has already happened, while Pew forecasts it will not happen for another 22 years.
Pew estimates that 5.3 million Jews live in the US, but unlike the Muslim population, Judaism is not growing in America, due largely to low birthrates.
Pew says the Muslim population will continue to increase and should surpass Judaism as the nations second most common religious faith by 2040.
The main drivers of Muslim population are high fertility rates of Muslim women, compared to Christian and Jewish women, along with continued migration of Muslims into the US from abroad.
Pew itself admits that that estimated Muslim population growth is difficult because there is no official count the US Census does not ask Americans their religious affiliation. So Pew is offering what amounts to its best guess based on its own surveys, outside sources and previous research.
The true size of the US Muslim population is likely somewhere in the middle of the Pew estimate and the CAIR estimate, probably around 5 million.
Previous reporting by WND has documented that one of the main drivers of Muslim immigration into the US is the food processing industry, especially the meatpacking sector, which employs an estimated 5 to 12 percent of its workforce with refugee labor.
Lutheran Refugee and Immigration Service doing business as Lutheran Social Services, along with the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, doing business as Catholic Charities, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, World Relief and several secular resettlement agencies serve as virtual headhunters for these global conglomerates in search of cheap labor for their hotels and factories.
Entire small cities and towns throughout the South and especially the Midwest have been transformed demographically over the last 10 years by the meatpacking industry cities such as Greeley and Fort Collins, Colorado; Lexington, Nebraska; Noel, Missouri; Aberdeen, South Dakota; Fargo, North Dakota; Garden City and Dodge City, Kansas; St. Cloud, Melrose, Willmar, Austin and Worthington, Minnesota.
Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services has signed a deal to provide a pilot program for meat-processing giant JBS Swift to train refugee labor inside the companys plants in four states. If it is successful JBS plans to roll it out nationwide to more than 100 plants.
The Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, whose top eight executives all bring home salaries of between $112,000 and $300,000, has profited greatly from its ties to global meat packers.
Meat plants in particular, and the food-processing industry in general, have long been a gateway into the United States for Third Worlders looking for a better economic lot in life. Chobani serves as a similar conduit with its massive yogurt plant in Twin Falls, Idaho.
Big Yogurt has learned from Big Meat, says Ann Corcoran, who tracks the global movement of migrants for Refugee Resettlement Watch.
Pew says the US Muslim population will reach 8.1 million by 2050. Interestingly, the folks at CAIR believe there are already that many Muslims in the US now, and CAIR is working on its own count.
Bashleer Mohamed, author of the Pew report, states the case as follows:
Muslims in the US are not as numerous as the number of Americans who identify as Jewish by religion, according to our estimate. At the same time, our projections suggest that the US Muslim population will grow much faster than the countrys Jewish population. By 2040, Muslims will replace Jews as the nations second-largest religious group after Christians. And by 2050, the US Muslim population is projected to reach 8.1 million, or 2.1% of the nations total population nearly twice the share of today.
According to the Pew study, conversions to Islam havent had a major impact on the size of the US Muslim population, at least not yet. Thats because nearly as many Americans convert to Islam as leave the faith every year. While about one-in-five American Muslim adults were raised in a different faith tradition and converted to Islam, a similar share of Americans who were raised Muslim now no longer identify with the faith.
Pew also found that the growth of the US Muslim population is uneven, with high concentrations in certain cities and states, such as New Jersey, New York, Michigan, Minnesota, Idaho, California, the Dakotas, Ohio, Illinois, North Carolina and Georgia, compared to relatively low numbers in other states like Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Hawaii.
Again, much of this discrepancy can be explained by tracking the movement of the meatpacking and hotel industries into more rural and semi-rural areas, not just major cities.
Another indicator of the rapidly increasing US Muslim population is the explosive growth in the number of mosques being built. There are more than 3,200 mosques now in the U.S., and more than 70 percent of them have been built since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
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