UK’s Social Mobility Commission Report Finds Just 1 in 5 British Muslims Work Full Time Jobs A new study conducted by Sheffield Hallam University on behalf of the United Kingdom’s Social Mobility Commission found that Britain’s Islamic population is struggling to integrate within the UK’s labor market. Among other things, the report found that only one-in-five (19.8 percent) British Muslims aged 16 to 74 has a full time job. Although the Commission attributes this low employment number to “Islamophobia” and racism, these charges are tenuous at best. Furthermore, the data itself does not necessarily warrant this conclusion. The report’s key findings are as follows:

Within the economically active population (age 16 to 74 years) only 1 in 5 (19.8%) of the Muslim population is in full-time employment, compared to more than 1 in 3 (34.9%) of the overall population (in England and Wales).

Muslim women in the UK are more likely than all other women to be economically inactive with 18% of Muslim women aged 16 to 74 recorded as “looking after home and family” compared with 6% in the overall population.

Only 6% of Muslims are in ‘higher managerial, administrative and professional occupations’ compared to 10% of the overall population. They also have slightly lower levels of qualifications, with approximately a quarter of Muslims over the age of 16 having ‘level 4 and above’ (degree-level and above) qualifications.

Moreover, nearly half of the Muslim population (46%) live in the 10% of the most deprived local authority districts.

The relatively low employment numbers for Britain’s Muslims are, to some degree, the result of a low labor force participation for Muslim women, who tend to have large families to care for—not racism or the specter of “Islamophobia”.

Neither are they out of the ordinary: the Islamic employment rate is abysmally low throughout Europe, whether in Germany or Denmark. In fact, some 84 percent of all welfare recipients in Denmark were non-Danes (mostly Muslims).

Furthermore, the relatively low level of managerial attainment is consistent with the relatively lower educational achievement among Muslim Britons. There is little need to blame racist white Britons for these issues, and yet that’s exactly what the report does.

The report says that the reason Muslims are struggling economically is because of systemic racism—this is according to “in-depth focus groups and interviews” conducted by the researchers with Muslim Britons.

Based on these (obviously biased) interviews, the researchers compiled a list of recommendations to help Muslims succeed. These include:

Increasing financial support for Muslims to attend university. Reforming Britain’s education programs with “sophisticated and practical diversity training programs with a focus on religious diversity”. And forcing businesses to acknowledge their “unconscious bias” in hiring, and undergo training in “diversity, religious literacy and cultural competence”—essentially affirmative action and free education about Islam.

These recommendations are particularly troubling, because they fail to address any of the actual issues—instead they simply shift the blame from Britain’s Muslim communities, and place is squarely on the shoulder of “Islamophobic” Britons.

Why should the rate of Islamic managers equal the rate of British managers when they are overall less-educated and experienced? The very notion of equal outcomes with different inputs is absurd on its face.

The fact is that there are strong cultural barriers at play: barriers which are implemented by the Islamic community itself. Until these disappear, a disparity will exist.