Recent polling shows that a majority or large plurality in every major European country would like to halt all further Muslim immigration. It is remarkable how, at least in Northern Europe, there is strong opposition to certain immigrant groups, but not to others, and that the divide cannot be understood along ‘racial’ lines in the American sense. East Asians and Southeast Asians, for example, are barely ever mentioned in the press. While selective xenophobia, the ongoing refugee and migrant crisis, Islamist terrorism, and religious differences are likely to all play their part in this, socio-economic data suggest that much of the resistance to further Muslim immigration may stem from the poor socioeconomic outcomes one can observe in many Muslim-majority communities in Europe. Yet, while many examples exist in plain sight, they are often hard to get good anything but anecdotal data on.

In Britain, for example, social problems that may point to religious and ethnic divides are treated as mostly taboo, and the Office of National Statistics has decided on an categorization of ethnicity which admirably combines almost every category error one could come up with: it juxtaposes races, cultural groups, single national origins, and a continent as supposedly mutually exclusive categories. In France, ethnicity is largely absent from national statistics as everyone with a passport becomes a citoyen and hence a Frenchman by pure principle. Once again, Danish data become helpful. The Danish state has no qualms about analyzing the connections between national origins and other aspects of its citizens’ lives. It does so in population-wide registry databases that link everything from tax records over medical journals, criminal records, school records to civil status (the data contain no information on subjective measures such as sexuality, religion, or politics). I analyzed some of these aggregated labor market data to show how specific national-origin groups do on the Danish labor market. They show considerable differences in outcomes.

First, I looked at the share of men in their prime working years — here defined as those aged 25–49 to avoid age-composition effects — who are not in education and whose primary income is from government transfers.

Fig 1 Share of men aged 25–49 whose primary income is from government transfers, 2015

As can be seen, the range is vast, from only 2.38 % men of Indian origin to 80.04 % men of Syrian origin living on some kind of transfer income. Four Muslim-majority countries stand as being the origin of particularly high numbers of beneficiaries: Syria, Somalia, Lebanon, and Iraq. Of all the countries that have rates above 20 %, only Russian and Yugoslavia are or were not Muslim-majority (no official data exist on which parts of the former Yugoslavia this group arrived from). The rate for Danish men was 10.61 %. For all groups, the number is higher than the official unemployment rates because those paid for by public job training and rehabilitation programs are included. To the right of Danish men on the graph lies a long tail of European, American, and South-, Southeast- and East Asian national origin groups. In fact, all Western immigrant groups are less frequent transfer beneficiaries than natives, while all Muslim-majority groups are more frequent transfer beneficiaries.

However, the graph above draws on data from 2015, in which year a very large group of Syrians immigrated during the European refugee crisis. If we instead only include those immigrants who had stayed in Denmark for at least 5 years — allowing for ample time to learn the language, for example — and average over a few years to obtain a more robust result, we get the following results:

Fig 2 Employment frequencies of those aged 16–64 Men and women, by country of origin, 2013–2015 average

Due to data availability, the age span in Fig 2 is 16–64 (all working-age individuals). Employment includes education and training. While Syrians who have stayed in the country between 5 and 15 years don’t stand out as a singular case, they are still the fourth lowest-ranked country by employment rate for both men and women. The situation for Somalis looks particularly problematic, with only 32.03 % of working-age men and 23.06 % of working-age women being in employment after at least 5 years of residence in the country. Almost all Muslim-majority countries have very low female employment rates; this is even true for the groups with the longest presence in the country such as Pakistanis (34.56%), Moroccans (41.27%), and Turks (44.76%). Somali, Iraqi, Syrian, Lebanese, and Afghani women all have employment rates below 40 %. The most telling results are those where a group has a low employment rate combined with a high benefits rate. People may stay outside of the labor market for a range of reasons, and by doing so they are not eligible for benefits; many non-natives who marry a Dane fall into this category, for example.

A common explanation to the problems faced by Somalis, Syrians, and Lebanese in the West is their refugee background (‘Lebanese’ mostly denotes stateless Palestinians). However, as can be seen from the two other major refugee groups, the Bosnians and Vietnamese, this is not immediately obvious (Vietnamese also have lower average crime rates than native Danes, while the opposite is true of all the Muslim-majority groups shown above).

The level of economic development of the country of origin is also not an obvious explanation: As could be seen on the first graph, almost no Chinese, Indian, or Filipino men receive government benefits, even though most arrived when their home countries were considerably worse off than they are today.

Unlike several other Muslim-majority groups, Somalis are not known for the small-scale entrepreneurship that Turkish, Pakistani, and Arab men, as well as Thai women, have taken to in Denmark. While Danish cities like in much of Europe is full of Arab greengrocers and Turkish kebab stalls, few Somali shops or restaurants exist: a meagre 1.83 % of Somalis are listed as self-employed, about a third of the native rate, and only roughly a sixth of the Lebanese and Turkish rates.

Finally, I tracked the labor market outcomes of some of the tail-end groups by years of residence in Denmark. If new arrivals are anything like older ones, this may inform us about the prospects for future immigrants from the same countries of origin. The results are shown for Somalis, Afghans, Chinese, and Indians:

Fig 3 Employment frequencies according to length of stay for men and women aged 16–64.

Three patterns seem to emerge: Those that are consistently high, primarily Indian men, who have high employment frequencies even in their first year of residence; those who start low, but go to high frequencies, such as Indian women and Chinese of both genders, and maybe Afghan men; and those who start low and never attain very high frequencies even after more than 25 years of residence, such as Afghan women, and especially Somali men and women, who peak at 47.62% and 39.29%, respectively.