Most Americans can’t find Somalia on a map, but we can certainly find Minnesota, right? Land of 10,000 lakes, land of 10 trillion mosquitoes, land of 3M and Spam and those great Duluth Trading Company ads, home of the Vikings and the Mall of America and the not-so-great Walter Mondale, right?
Minnesota, though, is also a stubbornly and mystifyingly blue state, which explains why it’s also home to one of the most generous welfare programs in the country. Minnesota Nice, right? But giving away free stuff has its flip side, and it’s for this reason, this generosity, that it’s also home to a section of Minneapolis called “Little Mogadishu” and to a large and ever-growing Somali community that’s literally changing the look of the state.
What began in Somalia in the early ‘90s with famine, civil war, and societal collapse evolved into Blackhawk Down in 1993, followed by an ostensibly well-intentioned federal effort to resettle desperate Somalis in Minnesota in the mid-’90s. Chain migration, er, family reunification followed, and now the state’s largest city, Minneapolis, resoundingly calls its Muslims to prayer five times a day and is represented in Congress by a Jew-hating Muslim leftist who may have married her brother to skirt our nation’s immigration laws.
If I can mix my metaphors: No good deed on the well-paved Road to Hell goes unpunished. But I wonder: Did Minnesotans ever vote on this?
My guess is no, they never voted on this. Didn’t vote on their taxpayer funds going to free stuff for immigrants. Didn’t vote for the chain migration that allowed a tiny Somali community to blow up and take over their biggest city in a relative heartbeat.
Nor did Minnesotans vote on the sorry state of their financial affairs. As Ryan Thorpe and Chris Rufo write in City Journal: “Minnesota is drowning in fraud. Billions in taxpayer dollars have been stolen during the administration of Governor Tim Walz alone. 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.”
If Minnesota were merely debt-ridden and fraud-fraught, it’d be largely indistinguishable from a lot of other blue states. But what makes Minnesota special is the type of fraud it’s fostering. I’ll let Thorpe and Rufo explain:
If you were to design a welfare program to facilitate fraud, it would probably look a lot like Minnesota’s Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services program. The HSS program, the first of its kind in the country, was launched with a noble goal: to help seniors, addicts, the disabled, and the mentally ill secure housing. It was designed with “low barriers to entry” and “minimal requirements for reimbursement.” Nonetheless, before the program went live in 2020, officials pegged its annual estimated price tag at $2.6 million. …
On September 18, [Acting U.S. Attorney Joseph] Thompson announced criminal indictments for HSS fraud against Moktar Hassan Aden, Mustafa Dayib Ali, Khalid Ahmed Dayib, Abdifitah Mohamud Mohamed, Christopher Adesoji Falade, Emmanuel Oluwademilade Falade, Asad Ahmed Adow, and Anwar Ahmed Adow — six of whom, according a U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesperson, are members of Minnesota’s Somali community. Thompson made clear that this is just the first round of charges for HSS fraud that his office will be prosecuting.
Got that? It’s only the beginning. But here’s the “best” part: “According to multiple law-enforcement sources, Minnesota’s Somali community has sent untold millions through a network of … informal clan-based money-traders that have wound up in the coffers of Al-Shabaab,” which is an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist organization.
How, exactly, are they doing it? By fraudulently diagnosing their kids with autism, then taking that taxpayer-funded Medicaid money and sending some of it to terrorists. Nice.
I can hear you saying, good reader, that I’m getting a bit carried away here with a tiny criminal minority of Minnesota’s glorious Somali diaspora. And perhaps I am. I mean, diversity is our strength, right? And immigrants make our country stronger and more prosperous, right?
Or do they? I mean, if that were really the case, why wouldn’t they have simply stayed put and made their own country stronger and more prosperous? Same with all those Mexicans and Guatemalans and Venezuelans and Dearbornistanians, right? For some reason, no one ever seems to ask this question of the open-borders Democrats.
On the one hand, Minnesotans did elect an incompetent commie-symp, jazz-handsy, valor-stealing, deployment-dodging beta male as their governor. But the Somali-immigrant horse had left the barn long before Tim Walz took office.
Still, as De Maistre put it centuries ago, every people gets the government they deserve. And Minnesotans are now getting it good and hard.
