The blame for Somali fraud in Minnesota goes to the Democratic Party and to the GOP, not to imported Somalis and their zero-sum culture, says the editorial board of Robert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.

“Minnesota’s Fraud Problem Isn’t Immigrants: It’s the vast size of the welfare state that corrupts them,” the newspaper’s editorial board wrote on January 2. It continues:

With so much money and so many programs, this [state’s welfare benefits are] an open vault for scammers — especially when politicians are loathe to police fraud because doing so might be called “racist” or “anti-poor.” But it’s also corrupting for beneficiaries who have an incentive to remain on the dole rather than build an independent life.

Republicans complain about fraud, but too few want to tackle the perverse incentives that allow it to flourish.

The article does not even try to explain why ordinary Americans — or migrants from European-style cultures — are far less likely to steal from the state’s myriad welfare programs.

Nor does the article consider that the Democratic Party’s elites have a rational — albeit a short-run — incentive to import blocs of poor migrants who rely on welfare payments. Similarly, the establishment wing of the GOP has gained in the short run via donations from business groups eager for more workers, rents, and consumers.

But the editorial does offer a way for GOP-aligned pro-migration advocates to indirectly undermine President Donald Trump’s popular curbs on the costly inflow of profit-shifting migrant workers, consumers, and renters.

The blame-welfare-not-migration pitch is catnip to wealthy investors who want to cut taxes and also defend the government’s migration and visa laws that shift vast wage and housing wealth from ordinary Americans to the investors.

For example, investor Chamath Palihaptiya is urging politicians to bet their careers on an anti-fraud message, even as he and other investors denounce Trump’s migrant crackdown and champion more legalized H-1B visa migration.

The Somali fraud “is an enormous opportunity for the Republican Party if they take this and run with this,” he said in a December 31 video:

Is there waste, fraud, and abuse in every state? Absolutely. I don’t think this is endemically a Democratic [Party] problem, but the scale of it is gargantuan in these Democratic states that if the Republicans don’t take advantage of it, I think it is a huge political missed calculation… If you want to have a chance in the midterms, and if you generally want to have a chance to level-set the country, you must take this and run with it… If it does die on the vine, it is the beginning of the end of the American Empire.

Combatting migrant fraud can also prevent higher taxes on wealthy people, Palihaptiya argues.

For now, Trump is zig-zagging on the issue. He is deporting many border migrants, blocking new migrants, and denouncing the cost of un-deported migrants, while making minor changes to the white-collar migration system favored by his investor supporters.

Government-Imported Somali Culture

The toxic nature of the imported Somali culture is ignored by the Wall Street Journal — even as it is being spotlighted by the Somalians’ responses to the exposure of their Somali fraud.

For example, a Somalian refugee in Oklahoma, Fardowsa Muhumed, scolded Somali fraudsters in Minnesota for failing to hide their theft, saying,” Why did you get caught?”

In the same video, she reportedly derided Americans, saying, “The infidels who don’t wash the shit out of their a**es are coming for us?!” 

Somali culture is a mix of Islam, tribalism, and bad economics.

Islam’s doctrine commands believers to hate non-Muslims. It also urges war against non-Muslim society, and approves the murder and the taking of sex slaves. This combative us-versus-them view makes it difficult for Muslims to accept the civic and legal obligations to other Americans that are the foundation of U.S. citizenship. 

The commandment for religious hate is usually tangled up in Somalia’s clannish culture of zero-sum “amoral familism,” where a gain for one group is seen as a loss for another group. 

“I grew up in a Somali clan-based society… Loyalty to kin was absolute. Loyalty to the nation was theoretical at best,” she writes in The Free Press, adding:

Amoral familism is a cultural blueprint. It assumes that resources are scarce, the world is dangerous, and survival depends on extracting maximum benefit for one’s own family. Nation-building makes no sense from that perspective. If a road is built, the question is not, “How will this help the community?” but “Which family will control access to it?” If foreign aid arrives, the question is not how to distribute it fairly, but which family will claim control.

This mindset explains why Somalia collapsed. It explains the dysfunction in Afghanistan, Haiti, and parts of North and West Africa. It explains why Minnesota now faces problems it can’t make sense of, let alone solve.

The result is that many Somali migrants resist assimilation and adopt predatory policies that undermine the ability of the free market to create direct and indirect benefits to buyers, sellers, and everyone else.