What's the Matter With Minnesota?

Michael Barone
Thu, 15 Jan 2026 16:41:17 -0800
Opinion

Minnesota? Somalis? Nine billion dollars in alleged welfare fraud?

To understand what's going on from a distance, it helps to understand basic culture. Minnesota was settled largely by people of Scandinavian and German ancestry.

In survey after survey, Minnesota has ranked No. 1 or No. 2 among states, often just behind neighboring and much smaller North Dakota, in social connectedness, civic participation, workforce participation and voter turnout. It has traditionally led the nation in levels of trust and conscientiousness.
Updated: Fri Jan 16, 2026

Minnesota? Somalis? Nine billion dollars in alleged welfare fraud?

To understand what's going on from a distance, it helps to understand basic culture. Minnesota was settled largely by people of Scandinavian and German ancestry.

In survey after survey, Minnesota has ranked No. 1 or No. 2 among states, often just behind neighboring and much smaller North Dakota, in social connectedness, civic participation, workforce participation and voter turnout. It has traditionally led the nation in levels of trust and conscientiousness.

This has been coupled with political behavior that resembles Scandinavian patterns. Minnesota, like North Dakota and fellow neighbor Wisconsin, had lively socialist-leaning third parties in the 1930s. It's still the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, the result of a fusion engineered by future Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1944.

As you might expect, Minnesotans have built a high-tax, high-spending state government. Like Scandinavians, they have trusted the state to provide services and have trusted individuals not to cheat in claiming benefits. Public support for these programs, as in Scandinavia, has traditionally been founded on confidence that aid goes only to the genuinely deserving.

The Somalis who have been the most visible and politically active migrants to Minnesota over the past generation provide a vivid contrast. "The Somali," the conservative writer Helen Andrews quotes a British official, "is convinced that he is entirely different from and vastly superior to any East African." Somalia has been a land of chaos, a home base of pirates.

Their home country has become a kind of no-man's land, an example of what the political scientist Edward Banfield called amoral familism, where people are loyal only to fellow clan members and have no sense of obligations to the mores of the larger society.

That's in vivid contrast, it turns out, to the rampant, possibly billion-dollar-plus frauds perpetrated by Somalis who arrived in Minnesota as refugees and their offspring. Federal prosecutions began in 2022, when Biden administration Attorney General Merrick Garland authorized prosecutions of the Feeding Our Future program to feed hungry children during the COVID-19 lockdown period.

As described in The New York Times last November, "State agencies reimbursed the group and its partners for invoices claiming to have fed tens of thousands of children. In reality, federal prosecutors said, most of the meals were nonexistent, and business owners spent the funds on luxury cars, houses and even real estate projects abroad."

In other words, this was a well-organized scam that required the cooperation or acquiescence of large numbers of people, including members of the Somali community as well as non-enforcement and non-auditing public officials.

Were they simply naive Minnesotans, accustomed to an almost entirely conscientious population? Or were they deterred by the charges of racism that would inevitably be launched at anyone questioning a Somali-run operation? Most likely some of both.

Any doubts that Feeding Our Future was a one-off exception have vanished with the exposure of other state-aided programs, which seemed to have no operations and no clients. Acting U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson, who resigned this week for reasons unrelated to fraud cases, has estimated that Somali-run frauds have swindled $9 billion of public money, and it's undisputed that the total take is at least in the hundreds of millions.

It's an obvious reason that DFL Gov. Tim Walz, the national party's 2024 nominee for vice president, announced last week that he wouldn't seek a third term.

Minnesota liberals like to argue that Somalis have contributed much to Minnesota, but aside from their contribution to racial diversity statistics, they find it hard to come up with specifics. Actual data are not encouraging, showing that even after 10 years in Minnesota, three-quarters of Somali households receive Medicaid, half receive food stamps, and one-quarter receive government cash. Only about half are proficient in English.

These numbers compare unfavorably with those of Hmong refugees who started arriving in Minnesota after the Vietnam War. After five decades, Hmong Minnesotans match state average incomes and home ownership rates, nearly match average high school graduation rates, and have no known involvement in massive welfare fraud.

Somalis, after three decades in Minnesota, have made little progress on those dimensions. A low-trust, low-conscientiousness culture has proved to be stubbornly persistent, and, unlike the Minnesota liberals who helped the Hmong fit in, the last generation of Minnesota liberals has done little to move Somalis away from a dysfunctional culture that they brought from their embattled and unproductive homeland and from an adversarial attitude to the larger American society.

The social connectedness of Minnesota liberals themselves has not disappeared. On the contrary, the network of volunteers monitoring and attempting to block Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation efforts, described vividly in The Wall Street Journal, is a prime example — and, as the death of Renee Good on Jan. 7 showed, a tragic one.

It can be seen as an example of organized civil disobedience, only its participants seem to lack any sense that, by trying to obstruct federal law enforcement, they are doing anything morally questionable or potentially felonious. As Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey have made it clear, they refuse to enforce federal immigration law and want to prevent the federal government from doing so.

The state and city lawsuits seeking to block federal enforcement, in open defiance of the Constitution's supremacy clause, stand out among the many absurd legal theories advanced by both the Trump administration's opponents and, at times, the administration itself. This posture is not merely wrongheaded but reckless. It places Walz and Frey in the moral tradition of segregationist governors such as George Wallace (D-Ala.) and Ross Barnett (D-Miss.), urging resistance to lawful federal authority, a kind of incitement that, as recent events have shown, can turn deadly for participants and bystanders alike.