There is no whitewashing this scandal: segments of the Somali community in Minneapolis have been engaged in systematic welfare fraud, and used some of the proceeds to fund the Al-Shabaab terror group in their homeland.

The enraging City Journal exposé presents a case study in why the United States must drastically slash the number of immigrants it admits, and become significantly more rigorous in choosing whom to admit and how to assimilate them.

“There is an issue here that is real,” a law-enforcement source said, “and if there is ever an event that is traceable back to these funds, or to people from this area, then this situation will take on a whole new set of optics.”

The US Attorney for Minnesota has obtained 56 guilty pleas involving Feeding Our Future, a nonprofit ostensibly set up to ensure food security for children during the pandemic, but which in reality hosed state taxpayers to the tune of $300 million. The organizations sponsored by Feeding Our Future were primarily owned and operated by members of Minnesota’s Somali community.

Feeding Our Future is only one such scheme. Investigators have uncovered massive fraud in Minnesota’s Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services, as well as federal child-welfare and autism programs. Asha Farhan Hassan, charged in the autism case, is also implicated in Feeding Our Future.

Hassan and her alleged co-conspirators recruited Somali parents’ children into autism therapy services — even if a child did not have an autism diagnosis — facilitating fraudulent claims. Parents reportedly received monthly kickbacks ranging from $300 to $1,500 per child, with some allegedly threatening to go to other fraud networks unless their rates were increased.

Sure enough, both the number of autism providers and the rate of diagnosis have ballooned, with Somali activists insisting, as City Journal reported, that their community needs separate services offering “culturally appropriate programming” (but of course!).

At least three law-enforcement sources working the Somali community told the outlet that some of the funds in question almost certainly made their way to Somalia’s Al Qaeda affiliate, al-Shabaab (“the youth”). The funds, the sources said, make their way back home through informal money-transfer networks, with the result that Minnesota taxpayers ended up serving as one of the terror group’s largest underwriters.

Even setting aside the terror connection, the organized fraud on display in the indictments and guilty pleas is a reminder that social-democratic programs are at risk when overwhelmed by ill-assimilated newcomers with no sense of duty and reciprocity to the host community.

But this isn’t a problem without a solution. As Barbara Jordan, the African-American lawmaker and civil-rights pioneer who chaired the Clinton-era Commission on Immigration Reform, argued, assimilation breaks down when the numbers pile up. When migrant communities can mass-import their own relatives via the so-called family preference program, the result is ghettoized enclaves in which newcomers can pretend like they’re still living back home — only with colder weather and thicker welfare nets.

The best way to break this cycle is by significantly slashing the aggregate number of newcomers; and shifting away from family-reunification to skills as the main basis for immigration. To put it bluntly: America doesn’t need Somali Uber drivers just as autonomous vehicles take off.

As for those already here, America might follow Denmark’s lead in actively breaking up ethnic ghettos, while, of course, mass-deporting anyone even marginally involved in such fraudulent schemes. Law-abiding Americans, including law-abiding immigrants, deserve no less.

---

Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It

SohrabAhmari

---