Most Americans are sick and tired of the kind of reactionary politics that does nothing to stop people stealing taxpayers’ hard-earned money. Take, for example, the circle-the-wagons responses to the scandal involving likely hundreds of Somali immigrants and descendants in Minnesota and the theft of more than a billion dollars from that state’s famously generous social safety nets over about the last five years.
The crime ring here involved an outrageously widespread scheme to defraud Minnesota’s Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services program through the creation of dubious nonprofit entities (such as one called Feeding Our Future) that could sign up individuals and then bill the state for social service work they never actually did for those folks, thereby allowing nefarious connected individuals to pocket the loot. Reportedly, more than 86 defendants, almost all of Somali origin and many with U.S. residency or citizenship, have been charged, with some 60 already given felony convictions. But this widely ignored story (nationally, at least) only gained national traction in the last couple of weeks once those with pre-existing narratives found the right fit.
The right realized several things. Here was an effective way to remind voters of the Democrats’ poorly managed money-spill at the tail end of the COVID-19 crisis and to attach blame for this scandal to Tim Walz, the state’s governor and recent vice presidential candidate, perhaps knocking him out of any future in national politics. The scandal also targeted one of the left’s most absurd and easily correctible weaknesses: a reluctance to call out crime when doing so might cause the whistleblower to be called a racist. So what if real harm is being done?
Here there were clear echoes of a yet-worse scheme in the U.K. that involved the sexual abuse of hundreds of young, working-class British girls mostly by older Pakistani men, even as the authorities downplayed the scale of the abuse and soft-pedaled investigations for years, apparently due to a reluctance to sow “community” discord. Everyone in Britain now knows the country failed those girls.
On the naturally defensive left, the Minnesota story was seen as necessitating firing back. Not against the crimes, but against anti-immigrant jingoism, as writ large by Donald Trump’s enraged and highly offensive statement that denigrated Somali immigrants as “garbage” and suggested they shouldn’t be in the country, declaring, “we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.” That’s why Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey was breaking bread for the cameras with Somali Americans this past week, even as Trump was fuming about kicking them all out of the country. For his part, Walz said he has put in new safeguards. But he seemed to rage not against the unfathomable duration of the billion-dollar crime spree, which he said “was stopping,” but against Trump’s reactive tirade, a justifiable target but also much easier than cleaning out his own house.
These are the words and actions of political leaders worried about the next election. We think most Americans understand what happened here and why, as well what is and is not appropriate to say and do.
They know Trump was wrong to denigrate an entire country as scofflaws and criminals, just as he was to imply that a majority of Somali Americans in Minnesota were part of this scheme. (There were hardly 80,000 people so accused.) On the other hand, the level of fraud here and the ease with which it was perpetrated is stunning ($1 billion is not small potatoes), not least because it stole money from those Minnesotans who most needed the help, which is something that Waltz might have noted with more outrage. And, if you examine the facts of the cases, it appears likely that much of the stolen Minnesota cash was sent back to Somalia, an impoverished nation where many people live on an income of little more than a $1 a day and whose GDP is almost wholly dependent on its diaspora sending money back home. One can hope it went to support families, but there are nefarious private and governmental groups in that nation such as the terror group al-Shabab and it’s hardly a stretch to believe they wanted in on the money flying their way so freely from the Midwest.
It’s also not racist to note that at least two generations of Somalis have had to withstand perpetually corrupt governments with leaders who were bilking their own populace. It thus is hardly surprising that some of them, demonstrably, didn’t see much morally wrong with taking advantage of a government program with very weak guardrails.
Americans by now are familiar with the amount of money stolen from the government during that COVID-era largesse. And, of course, as the pendulum swung hard to the left during that era, pressure mounted to reduce application burdens for government aid in the years that followed, and get the money out faster to those in need. The real story here is about the widespread folly of believing that all people would act in good faith. In these cases, they clearly took advantage.
It’s obvious that a federal inquiry is justified, however much Minnesota Democrats may want to avoid one. Any inquiry should focus on identifying what made it so easy to steal this money and why it was allowed to continue for so long, not on the entire Somali American community who have found a hospitable home in Minneapolis. One that most, but not all, of them deserve.
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