Peggy Levitt is Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Wellesley College. Peggy specializes in religious transnationalism, the immigrant experience, the migration and development nexus, and economic, political and cultural globalization.
Peggy Levitt is an expert on immigration and how the religious practices of both new and established immigrant groups are changing America and the homelands from which they come. She codirects the Transnational Studies Initiative and is a Research Fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.
Her new book, God Needs No Passport, is about how immigrants are changing the American religious landscape. Levitt argues that to understand immigration, one must first understand the impact of religion. She claims that immigration globalizes American religion as well as economics and politics and creates a more pluralistic, cosmopolitan American society. Simultaneously, American core values of family, community and hard work are replenished and exported.
Levitt states that Americans used to believe that immigrants came to America to “become American”, or at least to become hyphenated Americans, however she believes that this is no longer the case. The United States is increasingly becoming home to millions of people whose values are derived from countries and cultures around the world, and are therefore making the U.S. a place of greater religious and cultural diversity — a truly cosmopolitan nation. Levitt claims that it is no longer meaningful to talk about “us against them”, “English-only”, or to view America as a Judeo-Christian nation.
In Levitt's first book, The Transnational Villagers, Levitt argued that remittances are not just about money. Migrants also send social remittances, or ideas, practices, identities, and social capital back to the communities they come from, creating important catalysts for change.
