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I can not help but notice that the first people who substantially increased the number of non-white, non-native humans in the US were the slave owners. Some flavors of Christianity played a substantial role in the abolition, but few people today would say "having a non-white population is fine as long as you don't treat them as human beings", so blaming the abolitionists is rightfully not done.
Christianity is not a religion tied to a specific ethnic group. Any human can become a Christian, and at least at that point hope to be treated by other Christians as a human being.
This is not to say that Christianity demands equality. Historically, Christianity presided over the most unequal period in European history. The serf and the lord might or might not be equal before God in some abstract way, but if God made the world so unequal then the serf should accept his lot. Given that Christianity is compatible with inequality in general, I think it is equally compatible with racial inequality specifically. I mean, the slave owners were Christians of some flavor.
I think the case is similar with Islam, which is also open to all humans. While it has certainly endorsed societies which were very unequal along racial and other lines, you can say that it is not intrinsically racist.
Judaism for example is designed as a religion for one ethnicity. The conversion process seems more like an add-on, fundamentally it is not about converting other humans.
I don't really know about Hinduism, but given that you are already stuck with your caste for life (afaik), I do not think that there is much emphasis on a process to adopt heathens into one of the castes.
Is that so? Medieval Europe at least did not have slavery in any great amount. That is actually fairly unique for the time period and for the kind of societies they had. The Roman Empire had chattel slavery of pretty much the same kind that would later be re-introduced to the European colonies in the Americas. It seems to have been an old pan-Mediterranean institution, that died out in Christian Europe and was reintroduced basically by cribbing from the Arabs, who had kept it.
I would argue that being a serf was better than being a slave, but only marginally. Yes, you could not be sold away from the land, or be fed to the dogs without any pretense of justice, but mostly your lord captured all of the surplus and you survived on his whim.
So I would argue that your lord being your brother in Christ did gain you something as compared to your lord being a a warrior god who taught might makes right.
I concede that the Roman Empire was probably more unequal, though. For northern Europe, being a slave to some Germanic tribe was shittier than being a serf in the medieval age. But I would argue that the former societies were not very rich to begin with, so the from a Gini coefficient point of view the middle ages were probably worse.
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It's actually quite interesting that Christianity, to the limits of sources, never liked slavery very much, even in time periods when slavery was normal and uncontroversial, and that some of the first Christian-religiously-influenced laws ever passed were protecting slave welfare.
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I recall once reading online one Hindu arguing that there is no such process — that it is impossible for mleccha non-Indians to become Hindu — the best they can hope for is to be born Hindu in their next life.
I think views on conversion in Hinduism vary widely by religious flavor since there are so many different kinds of Hindu belief. For example the Hare Krishnas, despite their new-age-cult reputation, are situated within Hinduism proper and obviously accept, embrace and proselytize to converts. Historically caste was based on profession and there were limited ways in which people could change caste (for example some Brahmins historically changed to the warrior/leader caste iirc). Today the system is more ossified. Converts to Hinduism who have no Hindu background almost always do so for marriage and so would become part of the caste they are marrying into; I know of some cross-caste marriages in India, I'm not sure which caste the children become. Hypothetically if some larger group converted to Hinduism they could be assigned a caste, although there has been a debate about whether the government might issue a "no caste" certificate.
Most Hindus have no problem with foreign converts to Hinduism and the Hare Krishna founder who brought it to the West is often quite respected by at least some religious Hindus, but perhaps it would be best to ask one of our Indian regulars like @self_made_human.
There's no universal consensus on the matter, but like you say, the overwhelming majority of Hindus are overjoyed when someone converts, even to the kooky cults like the HKs.
Half of the BJPs regional shtick is the "Ghar wapasi" (Bring 'em home and back into the fold) movement, where Muslims are 'encouraged' to return to their ancestral Hinduism.
A foreign convert? That's a cherry on top. But I'm not aware of any formal way to assign caste, since well, Hinduism for most of its existence wasn't proselytizing, so there was not much need for it. The funny part is when people convert to Islam or Christianity to escape their lower caste status, only to find that those buggers still stick to it, de facto.
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