Last week, I wrote about the jaw-dropping fraud by Somali immigrants who bilked the U.S. and Minnesota taxpayers for billions of dollars in schemes ranging from Medicare fraud, a children's pandemic food program, to a scheme to defraud a federally funded autism program for children. That last one involved dozens of parents who allowed scammers to claim their child was suffering from autism to collect a kickback.
To add insult to catastrophe, millions of dollars from the proceeds of these schemes ended up in the coffers of al-Qaeda offshoot, Al-Shabaab.
The article by City Journal's Chris Rufo and Ryan Thorpe elicited howls of "racism" on the left. Rufo's comeback is classic.
He wrote, "A description of the facts should not be measured as 'racist or not racist,' but rather as 'true or not true.'”
About 700 Somalis, mostly living in Minnesota, are enjoying the blessings of "Temporary Protected Status" (TPS), with another 5,000 Somalis waiting to be approved.
There is nothing "temporary" about these protections. They've been in place since 1991. Donald Trump is trying to revoke the TPS of the 700 Somalis, giving Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem the go-ahead to speed the process and remove their protections.
However, there are about 43,000 residents of Minnesota born in Somalia, most of whom are clustered in the Minneapolis area. It is from this tightly knit, clannish population that the scam artists operated, often with the community's support.
This is not unusual for immigrants. Irish, Italians, Poles, and Slavs all had criminal gangs who preyed on the weak. It would be foolish to believe these gangs would not have been involved in similar schemes as the Somalis if there had been tens of billions of dollars in free money being handed out hand over fist to anyone who applied.
It's not immigrants per se that are the problem. It's our immigration system. The way we allow massive numbers of people to enter the U.S. from the same country in a short period of time leads directly to an effort to use America's beneficence against her. Coming as they do from horribly corrupt systems of governance, new arrivals must think they've died and gone to heaven. The millions of dollars available to an organized community like the Somalis, when all an immigrant has to do is stand in line for a few hours, fill out a few forms, and cash appears in a few days, must seem like magic.
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.
Law-abiding immigrants who are here legally should be left alone. But we should start putting the "Temporary" back in TPS. Donald Trump has ended TPS for immigrants from Venezuela, Honduras, Afghanistan, and, earlier this month, South Sudan. Now he's targeted newcomers from Somalia. Unraveling Joe Biden's maniacal drive to bring as many poor, ignorant, illiterate immigrants from the worst of the worst nations to the United States is a challenge for Trump and almost certainly for the next president as well.
