The billion-dollar fraud on social services during the pandemic, perpetuated mainly by Somali immigrants in Minneapolis, is shocking in scale. That government officials in Minnesota turned a blind eye to one of the largest welfare scandals in American history for fear of being seen as racist should surprise no one.
For years, the state has wrongly convinced itself that its black residents suffer from a deeply racist past. The progressives have made a crucial mistake by confusing the situation of new immigrants, who happen to be black Africans, with those who are descendants of American slaves. But they were certain they had to correct the past with dramatic policy changes.
This underrated story started with what seemed like an alarming 2019 investigation by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. labeled Minnesota “one of the most racially unjust states” – a conclusion based on a poverty rate four times higher for blacks than for whites. But this is the same state that had offered a warm welcome to refugees fleeing the Somali civil war through Lutheran and Catholic social service groups; by 2024, approximately 107,000 residents of Somali descent would live in Minnesota. The state had in effect imported large-scale black poverty – but this had everything to do with immigration and nothing to do with Jim Crow and its legacy.
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Data on poverty at the neighborhood level tells the story. In North Minneapolis’ Hawthorne neighborhood, one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, 38% of residents are black and 21% are foreign-born. In the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, 44.5% of residents are black and 42% of the population is foreign-born.
However, the paper attributed the economic gap not to immigration but to “special benefits that became available to the white population over time,” referring to “redlining” — federal mortgage guidelines that hindered blacks from buying homes in Minneapolis and most other American cities — but which had long since been abolished, long before the Somalis arrived.
But Minneapolis went into “how to be anti-racist” overdrive. Under the leadership of liberal Mayor Jacob Frey – who had become infamous for failing to crack down on the riots that followed the death of George Floyd – the city passed a law abolishing all single-family zones in Minneapolis. He made it clear that this was a form of reparations. According to Mayor Frey: The city, he told Politico, was perpetuating “racist policies… implicitly through our zoning code.” Then-City Council President Lisa Bender continued, “housing is inextricably linked to income, while all these other systems are failing, especially in Minnesota, people of color.”
The anti-racist rhetoric ignored the fact that racially integrated neighborhoods long existed in a city and state that historically had a relatively small black population—just 4.4% in 1970—before it rose to more than 18% today thanks to Somali immigration.
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As I have analyzed City magazine– which broke the story in October about fraud money possibly supporting a terrorist front group – in one of the city’s most affluent areas, a respectable 4.3% of households are African-American, compared to 7.4% for the metro area as a whole. The city’s Victory neighborhood is 18.3% African American and 40% of the population is in the highest income bracket. It is both prosperous and racially integrated. Minneapolis had no reason for white guilt.
But the Star-Tribune story landed at the dawn of the “how to become an anti-racist era” — and Minneapolis was on board, confusing immigrant poverty with racism.
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So it was that when a police officer tragically overreacted to the arrest of George Floyd, the city – and the country – concluded that policing, like zoning, is irredeemably racist. It was the same anti-zoning Mayor Frey who agreed when rioters set fire to the Third Precinct police station after Floyd’s death — prompting the city to defund the police in favor of social services. (New Yorkers may see the same playbook from newly elected Mayor Zohran Mamdani.)
In light of the perceived racist underpinnings of Somalia’s poverty, government officials had little intention of stopping the flow of federal dollars to bogus food banks and autism treatment centers. It’s possible that Gov. Tim Walz saw an influx of federal dollars as good news — a way to help address the supposedly systemic black-white wealth gap. The right approach, of course, involves what was once called assimilation: ensuring that Somalis learn English and acquire the skills necessary for upward mobility. Not exactly the agenda of the most prominent Somali-American, Rep. Ilhan Omar, herself a former refugee who is quick to denounce “systemic racism.”
It’s hard to understand the hyper-racial sensitivity of Minnesota progressives. Minneapolis elected Sharon Sayles Benton, the first black female mayor, in 1994; NFL great Alan Page became a judge on the state Supreme Court. And of course there’s the Minneapolis-born musical genius Prince.
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The state had no reason to conclude that its crackdown on welfare fraud among new immigrants from a country plagued by a corrupt government was racist. But in the wake of long-lasting but misplaced white guilt, that’s exactly what it did.
Taxpayers haven’t just lost financially. Citizens of a famously well-governed state will lose confidence in government.
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