Back in the day the FBI went after the Mafia.
What did the Italian community do? Did they moan and groan about how "racist" the police were? How they were being demonised as a whole community? How it was all unfair and discriminatory that they were being persecuted? That the FBI are "villains"?
No, they did not. They supported the FBI going after the criminal elements in their community. Even if they were Italian.
Contrast that with the Somali community in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
At every turn they are objecting, whining, crying and moaning about racism (of course!), about how they are unfairly being persecuted. The standard response: “you can’t paint an entire community with the same brush”. Sure. But the evidence is that the Somali community in Minnesota has been disproportionately involved in the defrauding the American taxpayer. Yet there’s no acceptance of the fact that they have criminal elements in their community and they must be confronted.
What they claim instead is "We Somalis own Minneapolis". Again: contrast with the Italian community back in the day. Where they accepted they had criminal elements — the Mafia! — and welcomed the authorities cracking down on them.
Shame on the leaders of the Somali community for this. People like the most disgraceful, the most ungrateful refugee EVER, Congress member Ilhan Omar, for leading the community this way. And the Mayor and the Police Chief.
The Massive Minnesota Welfare Scandal
The nation is finally awakening to an ongoing scandal of massive proportions in Minnesota, where state taxpayers have had somewhere north of $1 billion stolen from them by concentric rings of welfare fraudsters based in and around Minneapolis’s tightly knit Somali diaspora community. It is a story with far deeper implications than the mere loss of dollars and cents, one that implicates our national immigration policy, among other things. But let us first note the depth of the fraud and how long it was ignored by the media at large — although not by our friends at Power Line who have been following it from the beginning and especially Scott Johnson, who has covered the trials.
In September 2022, the federal government began to indict multiple sets of Minneapolis-area Somali Americans on charges of defrauding Minnesota welfare and public-assistance programs. First came the Feeding Our Future scandal, where (to date) 75 defendants associated with the Somali “charitable” organization allegedly chose to feed on the sudden flood of post-2020 Covid-era relief money available to anyone willing to claim a vaguely eleemosynary cause. (Feeding Our Future was able to hoover up millions of dollars of Covid funding with the promise of “providing school lunches” to disadvantaged children in the Twin Cities Somali community.)
The FBI raided their fake “meal locations” in January of 2022; the federal indictments have been piling up since then. But this turns out to have been only one of multiple government-fraud schemes emerging from the Twin Cities Somali community during the Covid era. On September 18, federal prosecutors also dropped the first in a wave of indictments, against eight defendants for defrauding the state’s Housing Stabilization Services program to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
There are more webs of fraud yet to untangle, and it seems they penetrate the entire local Somali community. A report by Ryan Thorpe and Christopher Rufo over at City Journal caught Donald Trump’s attention and led him to blow up the story and move to revoke Temporary Protected Status for all Somali migrants.
Now that the scandal has been dignified over the weekend with a New York Times investigative article — one that specifically notes Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s responsibility for a method of fraud that took shape and flight under his misadministration — progressive America is officially permitted to notice the matter, although it won’t draw the correct conclusions.
Career prosecutor Joe Thompson, who has the federal lead on the cases, has said: “This fraud crisis didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s the result of widespread failure across nearly every level of leadership in Minnesota: Politicians who turned a blind eye. Agencies that failed to act. Prosecutors and law enforcement who didn’t push hard enough. Reporters who ignored the story. Community leaders who stayed silent. And a public that wanted to believe it couldn’t happen here. This isn’t just a few criminals exploiting the system, this is a system that’s been begging to be exploited.”
He added, “If we keep ignoring the truth, we’re going to lose something far more important than money. We’re going to lose the Minnesota we know and love.”
The unpleasant reality is that we imported an element of Somalia’s culture of criminality, and for no good reason, while bogus charges of racism were used to keep suspicious authorities from following up on the blatant signs that something was amiss.
The scandal raises the question: What does America owe to those who seek to immigrate here? Surely, we as a nation are not commanded to accept an endless influx of people from third world countries with cultures inimical to Western values, merely because they have the status of “refugees.” What case is there to be made for admitting them in numbers large enough to re-create the cultural pathologies they escaped, only in miniature?
The answers to these questions from the left and libertarian open-border types tend to be saccharine clichés that have failed the test of reality in Minnesota.
