As I reported recently, there’s been a notable thread of Middle Eastern and African, usually Muslim, immigrants defrauding social welfare programmes in Australia. Anything from Muslim men claiming multiple spouses on Centrelink benefits (shamefully abetted by Centrelink staff choosing to turn a blind eye to what is a clear crime in Australia: bigamy) to dodgy childcare centres, to ripping off millions from vulnerable disabled people on the NDIS.
But these lot are rank amateurs compared to the mind-boggling scale of Somali welfare fraud in just one US state, Minnesota. Ten or 20 million dollars? Chump change, to these Muslim malefactors.
Federal prosecutors charged dozens of people with felonies, accusing them of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from a government program meant to keep children fed during the Covid-19 pandemic.
What a surprise! A deep-blue Democrat state, run by ‘Tampon Tim’, Kamala Harris’ running mate Tim Walz himself.
At first, many in the state saw the case as a one-off abuse during a health emergency. But as new schemes targeting the state’s generous safety net programs came to light, state and federal officials began to grapple with a jarring reality.
Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided.
Millions? Try over a billion – and that’s just on the latest counting.
Federal prosecutors say that 59 people have been convicted in those schemes so far, and that more than $1 billion in taxpayers’ money has been stolen in three plots they are investigating. That is more than Minnesota spends annually to run its Department of Corrections. Minnesota’s fraud scandal stood out even in the context of rampant theft during the pandemic, when Americans stole tens of billions through unemployment benefits, business loans and other forms of aid, according to federal auditors.
“Americans.”
Many Somali Americans in Minnesota say the fraud has damaged the reputation of their entire community, around 80,000 people, at a moment when their political and economic standing was on the rise.
Are they sure about that? This is the community, after all, whose most notable contribution to American society to date has been brother-marryin’ anti-Semite Ilhan Omar. Not to mention a grossly overrepresented prison population (of a population numbering 80–100,000, it’s estimated ) and a 40 per cent unemployment rate. Not to mention supplying dozens of fighters for ISIS and Al-Shabaab terror groups overseas and nearly two dozen convicted terrorists in the US itself.
But they dindu nuffin. Just ask them.
Debate over the fraud has opened new rifts between the state’s Somali community and other Minnesotans, and has left some Somali Americans saying they are unfairly facing a new layer of suspicion against all of them, rather than the small group accused of fraud. Critics of the Walz administration say that the fraud persisted partly because state officials were fearful of alienating the Somali community in Minnesota. Governor Walz, who has instituted new fraud-prevention safeguards, defended his administration’s actions.
Minnesotans are shocked – shocked I tell you – that putting a heap of sugar on the table has attracted a legion of ants.
The episode has raised broader questions for some residents about the sustainability of Minnesota’s Scandinavian-modeled system of robust safety net programs bankrolled by high taxes. That system helped create an environment that drew immigrants to the state over many decades, including tens of thousands of Somali refugees after their country descended into civil war in the 1990s.
The staggering scale of the fraud first became apparent during the Biden administration, when investigators noted that one welfare program had ballooned from $2.6 million to over $104 million in just a couple of years. And, as is happening in Australia under the NDIS, false diagnoses of ‘autism’ fueled even more welfare fraud.
It’s suspected that, as well as supplying jihadi fighters, the massive fraud was being used to funnel money to terrorist groups like Al-Shabaab.
Even more disgracefully, authorities who certainly knew about the fraud said nothing, because ‘racism’.
[Lawyer Ryan Pacyga], who also has represented other defendants in the fraud cases, said that some involved became convinced that state agencies were tolerating, if not tacitly allowing, the fraud […]
As a trial in the meals fraud case was coming to a close last summer, an attempt to bribe a juror included an explicit insinuation about racism, prosecutors said. Several defendants in the trial were found to have arranged to send a bag containing $120,000 to a juror along with a note that read, “Why, why, why is it always people of color and immigrants prosecuted for the fault of other people?”
I guess at least Minnesotans should count themselves lucky that Somali Muslims weren’t forming child-rape gangs, like Pakistanis in Britain, and getting away with it for years, because ‘racism’.
Not coincidentally, too, Somalis are a core Democrat voting bloc in Minnesota.
“Greedy people and businesses have learned how to exploit our programs,” James Clark, the inspector general at the Department of Human Services, told lawmakers during a recent hearing. “Fraud is the business model.”
When in America, do as they do in Somalia. Import the third world, become the third world.
Ahmed Samatar, a professor at Macalester College who is a leading expert in Somali studies, said […] 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 […]
“American society and the denizens of the state of Minnesota have been extremely good to Somalis,” said Dr Samatar, who is Somali American.
If only they’d reciprocated.
