Minnesota’s Massive Somali Fraud Shows the U.S. Needs a Remigration Policy

When my German immigrant ancestors arrived in the United States in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, they were refugees fleeing a homeland devastated by war. They were also drawn by the promise of opportunity in the newly formed territories of the American Midwest. They were poor, spoke limited English, and formed ethnic enclaves where they settled, eventually putting down permanent roots in Minnesota. At least in these respects, they share a superficial similarity to a more recent group of Minnesota immigrants hailing from the Horn of Africa.

That is where the similarities between Somalis and American immigrants of the past end.

Unlike my ancestors, the Somalis did not come to the United States to work. They came to America to become government dependents and clients of the Democratic Party. The overwhelming majority of the roughly quarter-million Somalis in the United States are an economic drain on the states where they reside. In Minnesota, more than four-fifths of Somalis are dependent on welfare, compared with only one-fifth of the native population. Nearly three-fourths are on Medicaid, compared with 19 percent of the general population.

As if that weren’t bad enough, it’s now been revealed that Minnesota’s Somali community has exploited the state’s generous welfare system to steal a staggering amount of taxpayer money—possibly $9 billion or more, in what may turn out to be the largest mass fraud in American history. They’ve done this by creating hundreds of fake social service businesses that each rake in millions of dollars through the state’s welfare programs by pretending to run childcare, healthcare, and food assistance programs. These exist only on paper and in empty office buildings with locked doors and blacked-out windows, as the YouTube journalist Nick Shirley showed recently in a viral documentary.

“The fraud is not small, it isn’t isolated,” Joseph Thompson, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota, told reporters in a mid-December press conference. “The magnitude cannot be overstated. What we see in Minnesota is not a handful of bad actors committing crimes. It’s a staggering, industrial-scale fraud. It’s swamping Minnesota and calling into question everything we know about our state.”