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.
This population did not scatter randomly across the country. Somali migrants disproportionately settled in states offering the most generous public benefits: expansive Medicaid eligibility, large child care subsidies, extensive language services in schools, and dense networks of refugee-focused nonprofit organizations. Minnesota became the epicenter, but similar targeting occurred elsewhere. That was not an accident; it was rational behavior in response to incentives.
What followed has been a sustained failure of assimilation, and, increasingly, an explosion of fraud.
The data are stark. More than half (52%) of children in Somali immigrant homes in Minnesota live in poverty, compared with just 8% of children in native-headed households. Roughly 39% of working-age Somalis lack a high school diploma, versus 5% of natives. Among working-age adult Somalis who have lived in the U.S. for more than a decade, about half still cannot speak English “very well.”
Welfare dependence mirrors these gaps. About 54% of Somali-headed households in Minnesota receive food stamps, and 73% include at least one person on Medicaid. For native households, the comparable figures are 7% and 18%. Nearly 9 in 10 Somali households with children receive some form of welfare.
Against that backdrop, the repeated revelations of nutrition program fraud, Medicaid abuse, and now child care payment scandals are not shocking. They are predictable.
Many cultural patterns from Somalia, particularly clan-based social organization, informal economies, and deep distrust of state institutions, travel with the diaspora. In Somalia, these norms evolved as survival mechanisms in a stateless society. Transplanted into a high-trust welfare state with weak enforcement and poorly designed incentives, they become something else entirely. Fraud networks are not aberrations; they are the extension of familiar institutional behavior into a permissive environment.
This is not a matter of temporary adjustment. Economist Garrett Jones has documented how cultural traits persist long after migration. Even generations later, immigrant communities retain distinct attitudes toward savings, regulation, and trust, patterns visible among descendants of Italian and Swedish migrants alike. Assimilation happens, but it is partial, uneven, and slow.
At the national level, the same pattern holds. If you want to know how prosperous a country is today, Jones argued, you should look at what the ancestors of its population were doing in 1500, before conquest and colonization reshuffled borders. Culture persists, even after migration.
Crucially, this is not about race. Black immigrant groups from high-trust, English-speaking societies often thrive in the U.S. Jamaican immigrants, for example, exhibit extremely high English proficiency, only about 1% are limited-English speakers, and a higher share hold bachelor’s degrees than the U.S. average. Culture matters, and it varies enormously across countries regardless of race.
That reality helps explain why Robert Macdonald, the former mayor of Lewiston, Maine, was right when he told Somali migrants to “accept our culture and leave your culture at the door.” Macdonald was pilloried for the remark, but his core insight was correct. A society cannot function if newcomers reject its norms while demanding its benefits. The furious pushback from Somali activists only underscored the problem: they did not want assimilation; they wanted accommodation.
Immigration policy is selection. For too long, the U.S. pretended otherwise. It admitted large numbers of migrants from failed states defined by clan loyalty, low trust, and hostility to formal institutions, then acted surprised when those traits reappeared here.
TRUMP’S TOTAL CONTROL OF THE BORDER IS THE SUCCESS STORY OF 2025
Credit is due, then, to President Donald Trump for recognizing the problem. Terminating temporary protected status for Somali nationals, instituting travel restrictions on Somali citizens, halting most visa and refugee entries, and pausing asylum applications are not acts of cruelty. They are acts of realism.
A nation has the right, and the obligation, to choose migrants whose cultures are compatible with its values. America ignored that truth for decades, and Minnesota’s experience shows what happens when it does.