What Should Be Done with All the Immigrants, Both Legal and Illegal?

According to a new report authored by Ryan Thorpe and Christopher F. Rufo and published at City Journal, Democrats in Minnesota oversaw millions of taxpayer dollars in fraud. The authors reported that much of the fraud was allegedly perpetrated by members of the Somali community in Minnesota, which is “sizeable.” 

Minnesota is drowning in fraud. Billions in taxpayer dollars have been stolen during the administration of Governor Tim Walz alone. Democratic state officials, overseeing one of the most generous welfare regimes in the country, are asleep at the switch. And the media, duty-bound by progressive pieties, refuse to connect the dots.

In many cases, the fraud has allegedly been perpetrated by members of Minnesota’s sizeable Somali community. Federal counterterrorism sources confirm that millions of dollars in stolen funds have been sent back to Somalia, where they ultimately landed in the hands of the terror group Al-Shabaab. As one confidential source put it: “The largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.”

Jarrett Stepman at The Daily Signal noted that the report by Thorpe and Rufo “set off a firestorm” as it brought the “outrageous scandal” into a “national conversation.” After quoting the above paragraph about Minnesota drowning in debt, Stepman explained as follows. 

The piece highlighted truly titanic fraud schemes involving various state welfare programs, including “Feeding Our Future,” a program that received hundreds of millions of dollars annually and was ultimately “being used to fund lavish lifestyles, purchase luxury vehicles, and buy real estate in the United States, Turkey, and Kenya.” …

Rufo was accused of being anti-immigrant and racist. Many on social media accused him of exaggerating the problem. But then The New York Times published a follow-up basically confirming that Minnesota’s social services were essentially eviscerated by Somali fraudsters under Walz’s watch.

There was a very important line in this piece provided by Ahmed Samatar, a professor at Macalester College. Samatar said, according to the Times, 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.”

This sort of gets to the heart of why immigration policies have been so out of whack and destructive in Western countries for a generation, producing the current justified backlash.

It should be no surprise that in concentrated Somali communities, like the ones that exist in Minnesota, similar scams have taken place. One doesn’t need to be wholly against immigration to understand that. After all, Thomas Jefferson warned in his famed “Notes on the State of Virginia” about taking in too many people from “absolute monarchies” who will bring with them “the principles of the governments they leave imbibed in their early youth.”

“These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children,” Jefferson wrote. “In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us in legislation. Our laws and institutions must therefore be guarded with jealous attention; and in order to preserve them, we must incorporate our immigrants into the body of our people.”

He recommended essentially slowing our roll bringing in people form such places. That’s prudence, not nativism.

Former President Joe Biden was either senile or complicit, and Democrat governors – particularly Walz -- are either complicit or stupid in the way that they encouraged and orchestrated illegal immigration into the United States. All Americans should be grateful for President Donald Trump’s plan for the United States to permanently pause all immigration from Third World countries and discontinue all federal benefits and subsidies for noncitizens.

Trump encouraged all illegal immigrants to self-deport themselves back to their home countries and said that the United States would consider denaturalizing migrants who are not a “net asset” to the United States. Since he must act within constitutional law, Trump may not be able to accomplish all that he desires, but just stopping the influx of migrants into the United States should be helpful.