Fraudsters in the Somali community of Minnesota stole billions of dollars from American taxpayers over a period of years, and the state government did nothing to stop it.
That outrageous scandal has finally become part of a “national conversation” after City Journal published a stunning article written by Christopher Rufo and Ryan Thorpe titled “The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer” in November. Al-Shabaab is a Somalia-based Islamist terror organization.
“Minnesota is drowning in fraud. Billions in taxpayer dollars have been stolen during the administration of Governor Tim Walz alone,” Rufo and Thorpe wrote. “Democratic state officials, overseeing one of the most generous welfare regimes in the country, are asleep at the switch. And the media, duty-bound by progressive pieties, refuse to connect the dots.”
The piece highlighted truly titanic fraud schemes involving various state welfare programs, including “Feeding Our Future,” a program that received hundreds of millions of dollars annually and was ultimately “being used to fund lavish lifestyles, purchase luxury vehicles, and buy real estate in the United States, Turkey, and Kenya.”
The report set off a firestorm.
Rufo was accused of being anti-immigrant and racist. Many on social media accused him of exaggerating the problem. But then The New York Times published a follow-up basically confirming that Minnesota’s social services were essentially eviscerated by Somali fraudsters under Walz’s watch.
There was a very important line in this piece provided by Ahmed Samatar, a professor at Macalester College. Samatar said, according to the Times, that “Somali refugees who came to the United States after their country’s civil war were raised in a culture in which stealing from the country’s dysfunctional and corrupt government was widespread.”
This sort of gets to the heart of why immigration policies have been so out of whack and destructive in Western countries for a generation, producing the current justified backlash.
It should be no surprise that in concentrated Somali communities, like the ones that exist in Minnesota, similar scams have taken place. One doesn’t need to be wholly against immigration to understand that. After all, Thomas Jefferson warned in his famed “Notes on the State of Virginia” about taking in too many people from “absolute monarchies” who will bring with them “the principles of the governments they leave imbibed in their early youth.”
“These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children,” Jefferson wrote. “In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us in legislation. Our laws and institutions must therefore be guarded with jealous attention; and in order to preserve them, we must incorporate our immigrants into the body of our people.”
He recommended essentially slowing our roll bringing in people from such places. That’s prudence, not nativism.
What we’ve seen under President Joe Biden and Democrat governors like Walz, is the furthest thing from prudence. Instead, our country has been subjected to a reckless, cynical vote grab combined with the toxic empathy of modern leftism.
President Donald Trump said on Sunday that the U.S. needs to stop taking people in from countries like Somalia where they have “virtually no government” and “then they come into our country and tell us how to run our country.”
The president is on to something here when talking about the Somalia issue. The war-torn nation typically ranks as one of the most corrupt on Earth. Theft of public money is commonplace.
In 2022 it was discovered that two-thirds of the five thousand civil servants in Somalia didn’t report to work and in many cases were likely “ghost employees” according to the Horn Observer.
Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud groused about this issue.
“There are more than 5,000 civil servants registered in our biometric system, but only 1,500 of them report to work every day,” he said, according to the Horn Observer. “Where are the rest? They do not exist or they do not live in the country. However, they are still paid. They are thieves and their superiors who accepted this scheme are also thieves. They are simply stealing public money.”
Hassan may be right, but it seems he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. He’s been accused of corruption related to public land sales.
There has been, no surprise, widespread problems with theft of international aid in Somalia too. The European Union had to temporarily suspend Somalia’s World Food Programme in 2023 because of widespread theft. Reuters reported how the program was supposed to send $130 a month to displaced persons in a refugee camp, but they would frequently only receive $65 after it was handled by the camp manager.
In 2024 the Minnesota Informer published an interesting piece about the corruption clearly taking place among Somalis in Minnesota. It was written by Kayseh Magan, a man with a Somali background who had worked as a fraud investigator in the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office.
Magan explained that widespread fraud was common in the Somali community. He said that this crime problem is the classic case of when “desire meets opportunity.” Magan wrote that “Minnesota’s public programs don’t adequately guard against organized fraud.”
Part of the issue: The fraudsters have exploited “the burgeoning political power of the Somali community, and the feckless fear that establishment politicians and state agencies show when confronted with charges of racism or Islamophobia.”
It’s here we see the crisis facing many Western governments playing out in the most extreme way in Minnesota. They’ve combined a generous welfare state with the near religious belief in mass immigration from developing, “third world” countries as Trump called them. To even question that system is to be ostracized as part of the wholly unacceptable “far right.”
The result in Europe, after years of evidence that the system isn’t working, is that governments literally silence people who disagree with unlimited immigration. The U.K. is conducting this Orwellian experiment in tyranny as I write this.
What we are seeing in the United States is hopefully an immigration reset of sorts. More Americans now question the value that unlimited, unchecked migration from dysfunctional countries brings to ours. What is happening in Minnesota needs to stop. The country can’t afford it.
