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The pandemic-era multibillion-dollar social services billing fraud, perpetuated primarily by Somali immigrants in Minneapolis, is shocking in its scale. That Minnesota public officials had turned a blind eye to one of the largest state welfare scandals in American history, for fear of being seen as racist, should surprise no one.
For years, the state has mistakenly convinced itself that its black residents suffer from a deeply racist past. Progressives made a key 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 sure they had to correct the past with dramatic political changes.
This underappreciated story began with what appeared to be an alarming 2019 investigation by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that called Minnesota “one of the most racially unequal states,” a conclusion based on a poverty rate four times higher for Blacks than whites. But this is the same state that had provided a warm welcome, through Lutheran and Catholic social service groups, to refugees fleeing the Somali civil war; By 2024, about 107,000 residents of Somali descent would reside in Minnesota. The state had effectively imported black poverty on a large scale, but this had everything to do with immigration and nothing to do with Jim Crow and its legacy.
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Neighborhood-level poverty data tells the story. In the Hawthorne neighborhood of north Minneapolis, one of the city's poorest, 38% of residents are black and 21% were foreign-born. In the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, 44.5% of residents are black and 42% of the population is foreign-born.
The newspaper, however, attributed the economic gap not to immigration but to “special benefits made available to the white population over time,” referring to “redlining” (federal mortgage guidelines that prevented blacks from buying homes, in Minneapolis and most other American cities), but which were abolished long ago, long before the Somalis arrived.
But Minneapolis went into overdrive on “how to be anti-racist.” Led by liberal Mayor Jacob Frey, who famously failed to quell the riots that followed the death of George Floyd, the city passed a law abolishing all single-family zoning in Minneapolis. He made it clear that doing so was a form of reparation. According to Mayor Frey: The city, he told Politico, was perpetuating “racist policies…implicitly through our zoning code.” Then-City Council Speaker Lisa Bender added, “housing is inextricably linked to income, with all these other systems that are failing, especially in Minnesota, people of color.”
Anti-racist rhetoric overlooked the fact that there were long racially integrated neighborhoods in a city and state that historically had a relatively small black population (just 4.4% in 1970) before increasing to more than 18% today, thanks to Somali immigration.
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As I analyzed for City Journal (which in October broke the story about fraudulent money that could support a terrorist front group) in one of the city's most affluent areas, a respectable 4.3% of its 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 its population is in the highest income category. It is a wealthy and racially integrated country. Minneapolis had no cause for white guilt.
But the Star-Tribune story landed at the beginning of “how to be an anti-racist era,” and Minneapolis agreed, confusing immigrant poverty with racism.
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So when a police officer tragically overreacted when arresting George Floyd, the city (and the country) concluded that policing, like zoning, is irredeemably racist. It was Mayor Frey himself, opposed to zoning, who agreed when rioters set fire to the city's Third Ward police station after Floyd's death, prompting the city to reduce policing in favor of social services. (New Yorkers can see the same playbook from Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.)
In light of the alleged racist undertones of Somali poverty, state officials were hardly going to stop the flow of federal dollars to bogus food banks and autism treatment centers. It's possible that Gov. Tim Walz saw an infusion of federal dollars as good news, a way to help address that supposedly systemic wealth gap between blacks and whites. The right approach, of course, involves what was once called assimilation: making sure Somalis learn English and acquire the skills they need to move up. Not exactly the agenda of the most prominent Somali-American representative, Ilhan Omar, who was once a refugee and is quick to denounce “systemic racism.”
It's hard to understand the hyperracial sensitivity of Minnesota progressives. Minneapolis elected Sharon Sayles Benton, its first black mayor, in 1994; NFL great Alan Page became a state Supreme Court justice. And, of course, there's the musical genius of Minneapolis-raised Prince.
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The state had no reason to conclude that cracking down on welfare fraud among new immigrants to a nation besieged by a corrupt government was racist. But, out of long-standing but misplaced white guilt, that's what he did.
Taxpayers have not only lost financially. Residents of a state famous for good governance will lose trust in the government.
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