If the purpose of a system is what it does then the purpose of America’s immigration system is Somali welfare fraud.
I can hear your objections: no, the purpose of America’s immigration system is to bring in the best and the brightest who have a burning desire to embody American ideals!
And to that I’ll say: don’t judge a system by its slogans, but by what it consistently generates.
And the American immigration system consistently generates the deliberate looting of the taxpayer and the theft of the American Dream from the very people who built it, funded it, and were promised it in return.
A City Journal investigative report in November found that billions of American taxpayer dollars have been stolen through fraud in Minnesota, much of it by Somali immigrants. Estimates suggest $9 billion and possibly up to $18 billion dollars have been stolen. The perpetrators created networks of nonprofits - daycares, nutrition services, autism therapy – that would submit to the government inflated invoices to claim reimbursements. Many of these nonprofits were created by government grants set aside for minority-owned businesses. Much of the stolen funds went to fund the lavish lifestyles of those involved, and it seems many in the community were complicit and received kickbacks for participating. Some of the money was sent to Somalia, where it landed in the hands of the terrorist group Al-Shabaab. As one source put it: “The largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.”
You may now be asking, why are there so many Somalis in Minnesota that they can run scams big enough to steal billions of dollars from taxpayers?
Somalia is a country in East Africa positioned along the gateway of maritime trade between Europe and Asia. It has the longest coastline on mainland Africa, sits on oil and gas reserves, and has untapped deposits of mineral wealth. Somalia also has rich river systems and one of Africa’s largest livestock populations.
Given all of this, it must be thriving, right?
Well, no.
Somalia ranks as one of the least developed nations in the world. It is one of the absolute lowest nations in the world on the Human Development Index. And it is ranked as the second most corrupt country in the world.
To understand the extent to which corruption pervades life in Somalia, we need to understand the way low-trust societies function. People in such a society do not typically assume fair dealing as a default in interactions. Institutions are seen as ineffectual or corrupt, laws are applied selectively, rules are made to be broken, and survival depends on clan ties. Trust is not extended outward to strangers or to abstract civic ideals, but inward through kin networks. Low-trust societies with weak state authority struggle to develop because rather than expend effort building institutions that could generate long-term stability, effort goes to short-term extraction. (Not everyone in a low-trust society adheres to these norms; discussions of societal trust are not absolute when it comes to the behavior of every individual but about observable tendencies that emerge at scale.)
In a low-trust society it is considered normal to exploit the system and other people in favor of your family. People who do this don’t think of themselves as unethical; they are acting within a moral framework where exploiting systems is the right thing to do. Everyone does it, everyone is expected to do it, and not doing it is unethical because it makes you a loser who failed your family. And in a low-trust society few turn their family members or neighbors in for committing crimes against the out-group.
In the ‘90s Somalia descended into civil war when a brutal dictator was ousted and warlords tore the country apart fighting over who should be the next brutal dictator. This is sometimes explained away as a result of European colonization, but this is lazy. Somalia experienced colonial rule during which time clans were pitted against one another and resistance suppressed. But it was colonialism that introduced large-scale commercial agriculture, built Somalia’s first railways and all-weather road networks, established a civil service, created a modern education system, and undertook public health measures that extended Somali life expectancy. And prior to colonization, Somalia was not peaceful nor particularly productive; it was a patchwork of clans that frequently descended into violence. Somalis are not passive objects of history and to suggest otherwise is patronizing; many issues in Somalia that are blamed on colonialism - like weak institutions, distrust of authority, and clan rivalry - were present long before colonization.
Now you might be saying, okay, civil war is tragic but I still don’t see what it has to do with billions of taxpayer dollars being stolen from Americans…
So now we need to look at the US immigration system.
The American Dream - for the World
For much of American history, the country was largely culturally cohesive, immigrants were overwhelmingly European by design, and there was intense, top-down assimilation pressures. There was no welfare system to greet newcomers upon arrival; they had to be productive or they would have to leave. It was so difficult that millions of immigrants did leave and return home. America’s immigration strategy was rooted in the belief that a shared civilizational background made integration and self-government possible, which is why immigrants were welcomed primarily from Europe, where long proximity and interrelated religious, legal, linguistic, and cultural inheritance made mutual understanding potentially more achievable. But even under those conditions immigration produced friction. The US responded by sharply curtailing immigration from 1924-1965 - a time in which America won two world wars, put men into space, and built the middle-class lifestyle that made the American Dream the envy of the world.
But this changed with the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. No longer would American immigration policy prioritize European immigrants; now we would have a system that drastically increased immigration from the developing world. The act was premised on the idea that immigration was not only supposed to serve America, but was a moral obligation we owed to the world. This is a deviation from the standard principle of immigration the world over: that a government’s primary loyalty is to its own citizens. The idea of assimilation was replaced with a celebration of multiculturalism and the myth of the propositional nation, while newcomers were viewed as interchangeable abstractions, eliminating serious discussion of cultural fit. While politicians at the time assured the public the act would leave America demographically unchanged, the Hart-Celler Act unleashed a rapid population shift that profoundly altered the nation’s composition in a single generation.
Both the Democrat and the Republican parties largely embraced this new immigration strategy because the Democrats gained an ever-expanding client electorate who would vote for them as long as they promised handouts, while the Republicans gained cheap labor and higher GDP metrics. And so this mentality – that Americans were owed nothing, while the world was owed the American dream - came to dominate US immigration policy.
And once immigration was cloaked in the guise of moral obligation, volume became a metric of virtue and every institution involved could be rewarded for increasing it. That is how an industry was built around bringing people to America, one in which money can be made at every stage.
Family-based visas, work visas, student visas, asylum claims, and status adjustments all generate revenue streams through fees, legal services, compliance bureaucracies, contractors, employers, and ancillary industries. Refugee resettlement is the most morally shielded and particularly subsidy-heavy part of the system: NGO’s are paid by the government per head to resettle refugees, lawyers and advocacy groups profit from every case they handle, employers gain access to cheap labor, politicians gain future client populations, and government bureaucracies justify ever larger budgets. This structure creates an incentive to redefine need endlessly, with each expansion framed as a moral necessity that only America is able to fix.
When the Somali Civil War began the American refugee industry stepped in to bring Somalis to America. Rather than temporary refuge, refugees in America are typically fast-tracked to permanent residency and citizenship. The initial wave of Somalis fled violence, but today, decades later, ongoing migration is driven primarily by chain migration. This is how hundreds of thousands of Somalis came to be resettled in America, primarily in Minnesota.
And what do we have in Minnesota?
We have a high-trust society.
The Good Life in Minnesota
In high trust societies people typically assume fair dealing from strangers and institutions. Social systems are understood to function because abuse is the exception rather than the rule. Laws can be lighter and enforcement limited, because most people choose to act in a trustworthy manner without oversight, meaning daily life can remain relatively free. These societies are efficient and prosperous because trust lowers the cost of social coordination. (Crime still exists in a high-trust society but it remains an exception punished by shared norms, not a strategy normalized by the system itself. Again, discussions of societal trust are not absolute when it comes to the behavior of every individual but about observable tendencies that emerge at scale.)
In high trust societies people generally view the welfare system as a collective moral agreement; welfare is an emergency safety net and it is funded by shared sacrifice and sustained precisely because the collective tacitly restrains themselves from abusing it.
And many Americans assume everyone in the world thinks like this.
But they do not.
People from low trust societies often see people from high trust societies as naïve: if you fail to protect yourself from being exploited, the moral failing lies with you, not the person who takes advantage. When people from low-trust societies encounter a welfare system like Minnesota’s they might not see a collective moral agreement, but an opportunity. Extracting as much as you can get from the system is then a rational show of competence. If you don’t game the system, there’s something wrong with you. Don’t you love your family? Don’t you care about your community?
High-trust societies have little built-in response to protect themselves from a massive influx of low-trust actors. Either low-trust actors scam, exploit social systems, and raise the risk of daily life for law-abiding citizens, or the state responds by imposing sweeping controls that treat everyone as suspect.
In both cases, the high-trust population loses.
I want robust welfare safety nets to exist for my fellow Americans and am happy to pay taxes to ensure such things exist, which is why this fraud must be spoken about plainly. There is no historical example of a generous welfare state operating unchanged for a long period alongside mass immigration because you can’t preserve societal generosity by dissolving the conditions that make generosity sustainable. You can have robust social safety nets or significant diversity, not both. Temporary emergency aid for refugees is a good thing, but de facto permanent welfare coupled with zero expectations more than thirty years after arrival are deliberate policy choices that erode self-sufficiency and hinder assimilation. People from low trust societies can integrate into American society, but high trust societies are a delicate thing and when fraud becomes widespread (and when enforcement is politically constrained due to fear of being called racist), the whole system risks collapse.
89 percent of Somali households with children are on welfare.
Center for Immigration Studies
If the purpose of a system is what it does then the purpose of America’s immigration system is to empower the elites and disempower the American people.
Mass immigration drives down wages and drives up competition for jobs. Rents skyrocket as housing supply is overwhelmed; 60% of rental growth since 2019 has come from foreign-born residents, putting home-ownership out of reach for millions of Americans. Emergency rooms get more crowded and hospital wait times lengthen. Traffic worsens as infrastructure strains. Social services are overwhelmed. Public schools are packed beyond capacity and districts divert resources to translation and remediation – funded by the taxpayers whose kids now receive less schooling. As the demographics change, politicians court populations along ethnic lines, importing distant conflicts into domestic politics.
Looking at this from a global context makes clear just how deranged America’s immigration system has become. In many countries, foreigners have no automatic path to citizenship, face labor market restrictions, pay higher residential rents, pay annual fees for dependents, pay higher utility bills than citizens, pay higher school fees than citizens, pay higher medical surcharges than citizens, and have no access to welfare or social benefits because those are restricted to citizens. The underlying logic is simple: the state exists for its citizens and foreigners are welcome if they contribute.
The American model inverts this logic: the American people pay for benefits they cannot access in order to support foreigners that have been brought to the country without the voter’s democratic consent. When it comes to our duties to one another, it is only ever the duties Americans owe to the rest of the world and never what newcomers owe to the society that has welcomed them.
Many Americans find it almost impossible to think about immigration rationally; the only guiding factor permitted in these discussion is performative compassion - as long as that compassion only flows toward the out-group and is never aimed at the in-group.
In the situation being created, if Americans keep to our traditional norms there will come a tipping point when high-trust behavior becomes a losing strategy. American behavior is good at building a successful society; high trust norms create prosperity – but only when broadly shared. When they are not shared, those virtues become liabilities for the individual, triggering a race to the bottom in which everyone is dragged into the same degraded equilibrium and the structure implodes.
What makes it absurd is that the entire system rests on the lie that the world is filled with people who are desperate to embody American ideals. But the rest of the world is not a waiting room of proto-Westerners eager to shed their culture. It might flatter our self-image but it erases the reality that many people reject American ideals. Most people are attached to their way of life and it is silly to pretend those ties dissolve the moment they cross a border. Many people come to America to pursue their own interests according to their own values – and that might be in direct conflict with what is actually best for America.
America is a welcoming country that accepts more immigrants every year than any other nation. When assimilation is the expectation and immigrants are limited so parallel societies cannot form, immigration can be a strength. But when people come in vast numbers, form parallel societies, do not assimilate, and view the host population as something to exploit, crisis will follow. Particularly as the native population recognizes it is funding its own dispossession.
The welfare fraud coming to light in Minnesota is repugnant. But what is even more repugnant is the larger scam that has been unfolding legally, openly, and with institutional approval for decades: mass immigration run as a moral racket that transfers wealth, erodes trust, fragments culture, and steadily degrades the conditions of life of the people expected to fund it. It should register as a national scandal of the highest order that our political parties have been importing an ever-increasing number of people who quickly become citizens while subsidizing them with money extracted from the native population so they can acquire assets and services that the natives themselves struggle to afford - and doing so as a routine policy for decades. Fraud is shocking because it violates our laws; but what should shock us more is how much damage has been done without breaking any laws at all.
Further Reading:
Love Thy Neighbor: A Christian Response to Mass Immigration
Nation, Not Notion: The American Inheritance
The Expat Delusion: Globalist Dreams, Populist Realities
Toward a Moral Imagination of Home: Everyone is an Expatriate Now