First, there was fraud in the Department of Agriculture’s Federal Child Nutrition Program. Then it was fraud in Medicaid’s “nonstandard benefits” programs. Now, there is fraud in the Department of Health and Human Services’s Child Care and Development Block Grant program. The common element running through all these scandals is Minnesota’s Somali community. This is a story not just about fraud, but about how the United States has failed to think seriously about cultural compatibility in immigration policy, and how the costs of that failure are borne by taxpayers and by the rule of law.
Minnesota’s Somali population is almost entirely a post-1990 phenomenon. Refugee resettlement following Somalia’s clan wars brought more than 10,000 Somalis to the state in the 1990s, with the population tripling by 2010 and surpassing 75,000 by 2024. Nationally, more than 110,000 Somali refugees were admitted between 2000 and 2024 alone. Nearly all (99.7%) are Muslim.
