Minnesota may be the single largest source of funds for the Somali terrorist organization al Shabaab. An investigation by Ryan Thorpe and Christopher F. Rufo of the Manhattan Institute found that schemes established in the state to provide healthcare, children’s services, and food distribution have been subjected to such gargantuan fraud that Minnesotan taxpayers may, in effect, be simultaneously funding several sides in Somalia’s civil war.
This is a reminder that not all cultures are equal. Minnesota‘s political structures were designed for Scandinavians, who are famously industrious, with a high level of social trust that has allowed them to sustain ambitious welfare programs with little abuse.
In the New World, as in the Old, they designed institutions that reflected their character. Minnesota’s Housing Stabilization Services program, which was supposed to provide housing for seniors, disabled people, and drug addicts, is a good example. With its client groups in mind, it was deliberately built to have “low barriers to entry” and “minimal requirements for reimbursement.”
It turns out that Somalis do not respond to such schemes in the way that Swedes do. Instead of simply over-claiming, as your unambitious American fraudster might, locals set up bogus companies to make fictitious claims running into hundreds of millions of dollars. Some of the money went on cars and holidays, but a chunk found its way to al Qaeda-aligned Islamists in Somalia, where remittances from overseas amount to a larger sum than the state budget.
“Do not paint an entire group of people with that same brush — demonizing them, putting them at risk when there is no proof to do that,” said Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), who has become a Republican target over the matter.
Walz has a point. Not every Somali American is a fraudster, and plenty of Minnesotans of Somali origin will be disgusted by the revelations. It does not follow, though, that Somalis and Swedes are indistinguishable.
For most of my life, discussing ethnic differences has been taboo. In the 1960s, “prejudice” meant attributing to an individual the real or imagined attributes of his group. By the 1990s, the same word had come to mean acknowledging that group variations exist at all.
The distinction is critical. To say, “You can’t do math because you’re a girl” is usually incorrect and always morally objectionable. To say, “In aggregate, boys are more likely than girls to be drawn to math” is simply to cite the data.
By the same token, to say, “If you’re a Somali, you’re probably a criminal” is both intellectually and morally wrong. To observe that Somalis are more likely to be involved in crime than Scandinavians is to state the facts.
You know where else Somalis are more likely to be involved in crime than Scandinavians? Scandinavia. A European Union report found that the employment rate among Somalis in Denmark was 38.5%, compared to 77.8% for the general population. In Sweden, it was 26% versus 86%. Somalis do equally badly on measures of income, social housing and welfare dependency. Somalis in Denmark are nine times as likely as other Danes to be involved in crime.
Now for the hard part. Education does not eradicate these disparities in the second generation. Indeed, the crime rate among Somalis born in Sweden seems to be higher than among their parents.
You can see why a taboo grew up around the matter. We don’t want to be, in the older sense of the word, prejudiced against individual Somalis. There is an enormous difference between “most fraudsters in Minnesota are Somalis” and “most Somalis in Minnesota are fraudsters.” The first may well be true; the second is almost certainly not. But people easily glide from one to the other, besmirching many blameless Somalis.
HOUSE OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE LAUNCHES INVESTIGATION INTO WALZ OVER ALLEGED SOMALI FRAUD
Still, our wilful blindness to heredity can lead to poor policy decisions, not least when it comes to choosing which nationalities to admit as immigrants. In Britain, the police have recently taken to describing terrorist suspects as “U.K.-born” to discourage the kind of rioting that followed the murder of three little girls by the son of Rwandan immigrants in Southport last year. Yet this new approach only serves to emphasize quite how many “U.K.-born” criminals have parents from a relatively narrow range of foreign countries.
A vague fear of being thought of as racist prevents policymakers from drawing a distinction, in immigration policy, between Somalis and Swedes. Yet, several institutions that flourished in societies with low levels of violence and high levels of trust are breaking down. Only now, when it is almost too late, are we starting to talk about it.
