Muslim Income Disadvantage in Western Europe

• In Event: 050 - Open Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 20. Race, Migration, and Knowledge Creation

Abstract

The recent surge in Middle Eastern asylum seekers to Western Europe makes the labor market integration of Muslims all the more urgent. Yet previous studies report an employment and income penalty to being Muslim. Before concluding this is due to religious discrimination per se, one should recall that earlier researchers found it difficult to distinguish the effects of religion and immigration on socioeconomic outcomes. This was because they measured religion with national origin and because the first generation’s disadvantages could be attributed to human capital, language, and socio-cultural differences of new immigrants that erode over time.
This paper examines whether explicitly self-identified Muslims (native-born, first- and second-generation) face a significant income penalty and analyzes how much this income gap closes after controlling for potentially confounding individual, household-, and country-level factors. It is based on pooled data for ten Northwestern Europe countries with relatively large Muslim populations from the last four rounds of the European Social Survey (2008- 2014), augmented with national characteristics (e.g., MIPEX labor market integration scores). We find Muslim income disadvantages remain for both men and women, even after taking into account migration background, religiosity, human capital, job characteristics, family composition, self-reported discrimination, institutional environment, and selectivity into employment. The inclusion of all control variables in progressive, stepwise models mediated some of the negative effect of being a Muslim on net household income but a statistically significant difference remains. The residual “cost” of being a Muslim is around half an income decile for both sexes.

Authors

• Svenja Kopyciok, Brown University

• Hilary Silver, Brown University