Wall Street Journal editorial board member Barton Swaim writes about the massive Minnesota Somali frauds we have been covering for a long while now on Power Line. Today Swaim devotes his weekly Unruly Republic column to “Our ‘digestible’ immigrants” (behind the WSJ paywall). He warms up to his theme with an overview of the scandal revealing our indigestible immigrants:
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The Somali fraud story is in some respects akin to the so-called grooming scandal in Britain, in which gangs of mostly Pakistani men sexually abused young girls, even as the country’s government and news media looked the other way, terrified by accusations of racism or “Islamophobia.” In the Twin Cities, state authorities couldn’t rouse themselves to stop the theft—hundreds of millions of dollars siphoned from Medicaid, housing and other welfare programs. It is to the great credit of the U.S., under administrations of both parties, that it didn’t allow the perpetrators’ race, religion or country of origin to hinder the prosecution of crime.
Both scandals, in the U.K. and Minnesota, raise a question most of us would rather not consider: that of large-scale immigration from predominantly Muslim countries. It’s true that other ethnic immigrant groups, Italians in the early 20th century most famously, imported forms of criminality from the home country. It’s also true that Minnesota’s roughly 80,000-strong Somali community contains many industrious people and good citizens.
But an unbiased observer could be forgiven for thinking Minnesota’s Somali population isn’t capable of assimilation. From Mr. Rosen’s essay: “Bad actors within the community would approach potential coconspirators without any fear of betrayal. Even the people who said no to phenomenal offers of tens of thousands of dollars in free taxpayer money didn’t inform the authorities that a major, community-wide fraud against the public was in progress. Potentially criminal oddities . . . went almost totally unreported to anyone in government. The FBI learned about Feeding Our Future”—a nonprofit that was one of the main vehicles of fraud—“from a whistleblower in the Department of Education, and not from any of the scam’s ground-level witnesses or participants.”
Ponder some observations made recently by the British historian Tom Holland. His book “Dominion” (2019) contends that Christianity has left an imprint on the West so deep as to be ineradicable and imperceptible. Even atheists, in nations once Christianized, think in Christian terms without knowing it. Only a Christian nation, I suspect Mr. Holland would say, would invent a social-welfare system as lavish and easily exploitable as Minnesota’s.
“Essentially, what Christianity has that Islam does not is a concept of the secular,” Mr. Holland remarked in a September podcast interview. From its beginning, he points out, Christianity has acknowledged that some parts of human society will function outside the demands of revelation—think of Jesus’ imperative to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. Islam, classically, acknowledges no such sphere. “I think Islam is uniquely indigestible for a secular mindset,” he says. Minnesota’s Somali population plainly doesn’t think of itself as digestible….
Whole thing here.
