Muslims are only one percent of the US population yet face disproportionate anxiety

Evidence

The anxiety that revolves around Muslims seems to be disproportionate because Muslims comprise a very small proportion of the total American population. Because the U.S. Census Bureau does not collect data on religious identity, there is no accurate count of the number of Muslims living in the United States, but the Pew Research Center has conducted surveys over the last decade to estimate the size of this population. In 2015, Pew projected that 3.3 million Muslims were living in America, comprising 1 percent of the total population (Mohamed 2016). Because Islam is one of the fastest growing religions in the world, Pew predicts that by 2040 Islam will be the second largest religion in the United States behind Christianity, with the number of Muslim Americans expected to grow to 8 million by 2050 (Mohamed 2016). These figures can be attributed to increased immigration to the United States and higher birth rates in the Muslim American community. The majority of all American Muslims are foreign-born (58 percent); 25 percent are from Arab countries and 35 percent are from South Asian countries (see table 1). — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 106

Categorization

• QUESTION: The Census deliberately does not collect religious identity data — worth chasing why and what this gap means for measuring the population under surveillance.