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I want to briefly talk about the massive Somali fraud network in Minnesota. UPDATE adding a more reputable source. Apparently Somalis have committed welfare fraud at least half a billion, maybe more, over the last couple decades. Much of it going home to Somalia to fund terrorist groups.
The surprising thing, looking into it, is that this seems to have been a bit of an open secret? Independent journalists were reporting on it for a while, and nobody seemed to care.
I think this story represents an overall change in the cultural climate, where this sort of information is finally becoming more popular to discuss. I'm reminded of the Rotherham scandal in the U.K. as well. Where there has been a major scandal involving mostly minority/immigrant groups that was covered up or just not really discussed, due to the Problematic nature.
I'm curious if this trend will continue moving forward, and we can perhaps have a more honest conversation about immigration and assimilation? We'll see...
From my personal perspective, the fact that every bit of meaningful news coming out of Minnesota is related to migrants behaving badly or the Politicians doing insanely self-destructive stuff has been ridiculously radicalizing on the immigration question.
Before, the literal only thing I 'knew' about Minnesota was the Movie FARGO and the accents. Never been there, but the people I meet from that area are unfailingly polite and stable if a little weird to my southern sensibilities.
I viewed it as a quaint little slice of Midwestern rural charm. A bit of cultural crossover between the U.S. and Canada, maybe.
I've since learned that for NGOs and the Obama and Biden administration, it was viewed as "Free Real Estate."
And if you asked me to define the precise polar opposite of the Minnesotan cultural archetype, I'd probably say "Somalia".
So naturally a whole bunch of Somalians with zero cultural connection and from an area with a completely incongruous environment got shoved into Minnesotan towns and given every single piece of governmental assistance possible to try to ease their transition... and now the full implications of that are unavoidable. The existence of Ihlan Omar alone is enough for me to balk.
All the more so because as far as I can tell the Minnesotans were never asked, nor do they currently have much of a say. That is what really makes the situation feel 'unfair' if you ask me. The FedGov, through cooperation with NGOs (funded by FedGov) can instantly and irretrievably change the entire character of a given town without technically violating anyone's rights or needing their direct approval.
We've seen how well off communities react to this (Remember Desantis' Martha's Vineyard stunt), but these towns probably have little political clout and not much wealth to speak of.
Wait, how do you think they got there?
The current refugee regime dates back to Carter’s presidency. It integrated the efforts of existing VOLAGs, which are probably the NGOs you have in mind. Not exactly a new invention.
Minnesota has a bunch of NGOs, including some of the VOLAGs. Global Refuge is Lutheran and USCCB Catholic; both denominations are well-represented in the state. Historically, they’ve literally volunteered to take refugees. I believe they’re ending up in the Twin Cities more than individual towns, but I don’t have a source for that.
Somalis specifically started fleeing their civil war in the early 90s. Omar got here in ‘95. There was definitely a surge around 2012 coinciding with a new push in the war; that accounts for about 6,000 Minnesotans. More stats here.
Point is, the Somali population mostly pre-dates Obama and definitely pre-dates Biden. There’s been plenty of support from native Minnesota institutions, largely downstream of a strong Christian presence. The national involvement was hashed out before there was even a Somalian civil war, and continued for decades without today’s wailing and gnashing of teeth. I don’t think you can write it off as nonconsensual Federal airdrops to random towns.
I'm not saying they were hiding it.
The process was definitely transparent in that they will straight up tell you how many they brought in.
I just note that somehow, the Sub-Saharan Immigrant population was about 1.3 million in 2010, and is listed at 2.5 million in 2024, so almost doubling.
Do I have to point out who the sitting Presidents were during the majority of that time period?
And the included map shows that a huge number of them were indeed dropped off in Minnesota, to the point they're around 3% of the population in the Minneapolis area.
The part that hasn't become so transparent until lately is exactly how much aid these folks were receiving, and, likewise, how much fraud and crime many were involved in.
If the Minnesotans start to disapprove of this situation, what's their recourse, precisely?
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Unfortunaltely, Minnesota, for some reason or another, is incredibly liberal relative to its demographics. The non-africans voted for billions of africans, and they continue to vote for billions of africans for the forseeable future.
I don't think they voted for them all to be slammed down into the same jurisdictions granting them instant majorities and almost zero demand to truly assimilate.
Hell, if they had been spread around the country rather than specifically creating ethnic enclaves with outsized political power, I would find it less objectionable.
Yet the minnesotan whites who just had a million somalians dropped in their small town will still vote blue no matter who
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It’s not actually incredibly liberal relative to demographics, it’s full of secular urban northern euros.
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Say what you will about the people of Boston, at least most of the money they were funneling to terrorists came out of their own pockets and not the taxpayer’s.
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I don't see why it would. We haven't had a national conversation about fraud in the Orthodox Jewish community and there are still hebrew signs in the Hudson valley; or any conversation at all about fraud among Baptist churches.
Here's a bonus case with a pastor who stole someone's identity, defrauded the military through fake education funds, and then abused a minor girl at the church.
The problem is really that any high trust group can defraud the government pretty easily.
In general, trusting your family is a pretty major hack against the American legal system. The entire system is built around not trusting your family. Being high trust enough to put income, properties, or businesses in the name of your family members can get you out of taxes, into subsidies, and boy does it make for a fun divorce to untangle. Immigrants of all kinds are notorious for this, as are small family businesses. Combine the two and there goes your week.
A Russian with a small business is a nightmare in a divorce case. The house is half in his name and half in his mother's, but the down payment was supposedly lent to him by his brother, but no one has any documentation of that money ever being transferred. The business is a partnership with an uncle, and no one knows where the money came from or where it goes.
A local family, our local feudal lords around here, when one of the sons got divorced, his wife was surprised to find out that while she was under the impression they'd been living a normal upper middle class life with a house and two cars, actually they had almost no assets, that the house and the cars belonged to his father and they had effectively no equity in anything.
Another local family filed tax returns for family members who never worked for the business, for income that the family members in question never actually received, in order to distribute income taxes around in some way or other.
Anyone who looks around will have similar stories. If you can trust each other enough to count on getting what's yours later, then the government has a lot of trouble pinning you down.
It's hard not to be horrified of all that goes on. The government tax incentives and welfare schemes that slosh around are insane.
Yep, I remember a high profile case of Moroccan soccer player who got out of divorce settlement worth $70 million, as apparently everything was owned by his mother.
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Counterpoint: trusting your family also creates some of the most unhinged legal drama.
One branch of my family has a bit of a “trailer park slum lord” thing going in the Southeast. Buy foreclosed lots, rent them back to the former owners, clean out the ones who can’t or won’t pay.
That branch includes one brother who is very much not welcome in the family business. He’s a scammer who’s known to show up and claim property when anyone near the community dies. Sometimes he even waves a convenient will. He’d happily file a few lawsuits if he thought there was any chance of getting a payout.
There is zero chance that the family business can pull those kind of accounting tricks, because they know their brother would come ruin it. And that’s for quite literally clannish behavior!
Trusting each other works until it doesn’t. There’s a reason that bigger institutions accrue more and more guardrails.
Sure, I'm not saying the execution is perfect every time or that it's an unbeatable cheat code. But I am saying it's a wildly common situation, and it often allows a high-trust grouping to evade taxes and other legal issues by using informal agreements.
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The real lesson, as always, is 'coordination problems are hard'. The son of the local feudal lord, in that case, was kept in line by economic dependence on the family patriarch(he didn't own anything), who just had to pick a stool pigeon smart enough not to bite the hand that feeds(that is, to never disobey, ever, for personal gain) and treat them well. The Orthodox Jews believe they have a divine commandment to obey their rebbe. Albanians stab each other in the back all the time, but they keep the drama in-community- informing on their shady dealings is the one sin that gets you cut off. The mafia enforces their no-defection policy lethally.
I suspect your slumlord kinfolk lack the ruthlessness of the albanians and mafiosi, and the central coordination point of the feudal lord, and the genuine belief of the Jews.
Weirdly, it might have been done precisely to keep assets in the family in case of divorce. "Oh, sorry honey, you thought you were going to get 50% of everything? In fact I don't personally own anything, it's all family trust/business assets, so good luck with that!"
(I'd been binging a lot of dumb Youtube 'revenge stories' and a couple of these have that exact set-up: wronged wife gets wind that hubby intends to leave her without a penny, steal her assets, and set up with new snookums so she lawyers up in secret and transfers everything into a trust/years back before they got married put everything into the business name so the house, cars, etc. are all technically business assets that they have the use of).
Local feudal lord arranges it so blood kin have the use of houses, cars, bank accounts and so forth, but if greedy spouses try to despoil them in a divorce, they end up with nothing since technically the married kids own nothing. Kids know that when Father kicks the bucket, they'll inherit, so they have no incentive to go against this arrangement. If they do end up getting divorced, they know they'll lose nothing.
It serves numerous purposes, and the divorce one is probably low on the list.
The primary justification given to family is vague "tax advantages;" which I'm not sure ultimately pay off in every case. Maneuvering who makes what money and who or what has title to which asset can be useful, but when it always comes up "daddy controls everything and you get what little he wants to give you;" well then I doubt that it's all about the tax advantages.
Knowing the family dynamics, the biggest reason was that the patriarch wanted to keep everyone enslaved to himself, totally dependent on him for their livelihoods. This extended through other family dynamics: he had numerous children, and none of them went to college, and he managed their work lives such that none of them ever built easily transferable experience. You worked for the family business until he died or you died, and as long as you worked for the family business you lived in luxury, but if you left you were out in the cold with no assets and no easy transition to another job that would pay anything like the same total compensation. He underpaid his kids for the work they did, but made up the difference by paying for their housing and cars, their vacations to family properties, company employees doing domestic labor at their homes, etc. But this in turn means being a 40 year old man with kids, and living where daddy tells you and driving the car your daddy agrees on and never going against his will.
The break up daddy was worried about was between him and his kids, not his kids and their spouses. That's just a side benefit of the arrangement.
That's clear, then.
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For some odd reason, I suspect that a husband wouldn't have as much success with that strategy. I've heard of a few alimony/child support cases where the court is less "pay to the extent of your ability" and more "die broke in a gutter".
The problem here would be that alimony is based on the income of the partners, not any expected inheritance. Assume for this hypothetical that I am "Worth" $200k/yr after taxes.
Scenario A) I work for a law firm where I am payed $200k/yr after taxes, I live on $100k and save the rest.
Scenario B) I work for the family business, I receive a salary of $100k/yr after taxes, I save nothing, the rest remains within the family and either benefits me indirectly or will come to me as inheritance eventually.
If Mrs. FiveHour left me, alimony and property settlement would be calculated based on my income and assets. Under Scenario A, that would be based on $200k/yr in income plus splitting the savings. Under Scenario B, it would be based on $100k/yr and there are no savings to split. A divorcing spouse can't reach speculative inheritance.
The "trick" is in trusting my folks to manage the money for me for decades before I see it.
Child support is a little different, as it ought to be.
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Yeah but they've still fundamentally got to come for the property of the divorced. They can't easily reach out to third parties
Not the court's problem in those stories: Pay up or get punished for failing to pay.
If you already own nothing and work for your (shady) dad, the available punishments are quite limited though.
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The NY Post links to A Somali-American former investigator: why you’re hearing about fraud in my community, which may have been a better starting point for discussion.
How is a Rufo-coauthored article better than a Rufo-sourced article?
I have some doubts about this part of his proposed solution.
"Must" != "I have confidence they will"
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This article doesn't bring it up specifically, but it's been speculated the incredible increase in autism centers, and support costs is also related to Somali-organized fraud.
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Welfare fraud is rampant in the US. Given the scope of IRS's surveillance, welfare fraud looks like an intended loophole rather than a egregious crime.
How does welfare fraud work ? My understanding is:
I followed links in the article, and the sources are weird.
The first link points to a Pandemic relief fund scandal.
The primary culprit is a white lady who used pandemic relief funds to fraudulently route money to for-profit restaurants and live a lavish lifestyle.
Based on another link (which I had to chase down separately), there are many Somali secondary defendants, but the primary perpetrator was a white woman.
The 2nd link points to election integrity concerns. Nothing to do with fraud.
Finally, the 3rd link gives us something useful
Ok, finally, we're onto something.
I believe your claim has validity, but all the linked articles take many leaps of logic and rounding of numbers to reach this specific conclusions.
Yes, on the balance, around half a billion in funds were used in programs that had fraud. It is not clear than 100% of those funds were fraudulently used. It is not clear that 100% of the fraudulently used funds were used by Somalis. It is not clear that 100% of the Somalian fraud had to do with sending money back to Somalia. It is not clear that 100% of the money sent back to Somalia was sent to terrorists.
If you 50% at each step, it is still many millions being sent to Somalian terrorists. I also agree with your wider point, that integration of ghettoized tribal societies should not be taken for granted. But, the eventual sum sent to Somali terrorists is likely less than $100 million.
In cases like this, I'd prefer if we shared the more reputed sources (City Journal) instead of rage-baiting sources like NY Post which add nothing to the original [City Journal] sources.
Thanks for the thoughts and the link, updated the OP.
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The Somali-associated government fraud is bad. To steel man, set aside the Feeding Our Future and housing stabilization fraud schemes, and focus just on the autism assistance scheme. Compliant doctors were found to diagnose Somali-American children at a rate three times that of other Minnesotan children, multiple fake LLCs were set up to assist lower income parents with their supposedly-autistic children, and these LLCs paid kickbacks to the parents out of the state and federal funds they were getting and pocketing. In what is much more of an indictment of the Somali-American community in Minnesota than particular fraudsters who are Somali-American behind the other schemes, in the autism assistance fraud, numerous families where shopping among the LLC fronts based on how large of a kickback they were offered by each, and switching between them. This in particular is widespread corruption within the community.
But also to steel man, the original report cited by the NY Post doesn’t fully make the case in the way Rufo frames it for maximum offense. It didn’t actually track any specific funds. And cites only retired feds. It just notes there was massive fraud, and remittances going on at the same time. And as /u/DradisPing points out below, Somali is so fucked up, and its civil war run through family/clan ties, that Al-Shabaab is going to get a taste of pretty much any money than reaches those clans sympathetic their half of the civil war. And as /u/hydroacetylene added, the other half of the civil war is probably, also.
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I wasn’t impressed last time people were suddenly interested in minnesota, so my expectations are pretty low. Just flipping through the Post article intermingles a number of claims. It’s relying on the City Journal report, anyway, so let’s go there.
So numbers basically evaporate as we move from fraudulent charities to overall remittances to al-Shabab’s cut. Not surprising. But anything related to terrorism still operates on homeopathic principles: diluting it makes people take it more seriously.
(Man, peeling back the calendar, reveals the year: 2001)
I don’t know why you would expect a “more honest conversation”. You’re going to put off anybody who has the cultural antibodies to deal with this flavor of criticism. You might as well accuse Somalia of hiding WMDs. It’s not going to convince anybody new.
Hmm I mean this is much less an argument for war or anything, more an argument that immigrant groups on the whole likely commit a lot of fraud / have more problems than is immediately apparent?
I agree about the source and updated it.
I’d differentiate between different types of immigrant groups. Minnesota, IIRC, has the nation’s largest Hmong and Karen (not Karens, but the Karen) populations and doesn’t see the same kinds of issues that it has with the Somalian expat community.
The Somalis are far more insular. You have clan loyalties solidified by cousin marriages. And also, Islam. Thinking aloud, the Hmong also have clans, but aren’t insular and have integrated fairly well. It helps many of them love fishing and Minnesota is the Land of 10,000 Lakes.
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Okay, I guess I fumbled that metaphor.
There was a period after 9/11 when mentioning terrorism basically won any number of debates. American politics adapted, and now the risk of a terrorist link is kind of priced in. Very few of the people who weren’t already moved by the outrageous fraud are going to be moved by this addendum.
It might be a different story if Somali Minnesotans directly funded a known terrorist attack, but up until that point, it’s largely academic.
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Would that flavor be "doesn't trust the NY Post" (fair, ish) or "thinks all immigrants are fully above reproach" (the Tim Walz special)?
More “assumes it’s the undead hand of Dick Cheney.”
Though there’s also a subset who would endorse “can’t free Palestine without breaking a few eggs.”
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I would note that the fraud at issue here isn't welfare fraud in the popular sense of people lying on application forms to get an extra $367/month from the government or whatever, but a more sophisticated form of white collar crime that is both more damaging in terms of total dollar amount and harder to detect. A lot of public services aren't provided by the government itself but are in essence contracted out to private companies and nonprofits, who are reimbursed for their services at fixed rates. The fraud comes in when these providers submit reimbursement claims for fictitious services.
At one extreme, this scam doesn't involve the provision of services at all. One can simply rent an office, buy a bunch of personal information for the demographic you're targeting, and start submitting reimbursements for services you never provided for clients who may be entirely fictitious. This is cheap and easy to do, but is necessarily limited, as one can only keep it up for so long before someone starts asking questions, at which point the entire operation falls apart because you can't credibly claim the charges were legitimate. At the other end of the spectrum, the fraud can exist as part of a legitimate organization that actually is providing most of the services it claims it's providing. The upside to this is that if anyone investigates your operation looks perfectly normal, with offices full of clients and invoices for relevant expenses. The downside is that you actually need to go through the process of providing services, which involves incurring expenditures that you may not be compensated for, including employees who may be inclined to blow the whistle when they start wondering why they're seeing reimbursement bills for services they know weren't provided. One upside, though, is that in the event that an investigator does find something untoward, it can be explained away as an administrative error or the consequence of a legitimate dispute.
Which end of the spectrum the fraud falls on usually depends on whether the fraudster intended on the whole thing being a sham from the beginning or if he realized he could pad his income by committing a little fraud on the side. The frauds in question here lean more towards the former, though they weren't quite as blatant as the first example I gave. They created enough of a front that the fraud wouldn't be obvious through a casual inquiry, but would be easily uncovered by a dedicated investigation. I would note that one thing that's misleading in both the Post article and the post itself is that these weren't "open secrets" that were only covered by independent journalists but actual scandals. The biggest fraud, the Feeding Our Future fraud, broke in 2022 and was covered in local media, including both major newspapers in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, local television news, and the local NPR affiliate. And even that scandal, in which Feeding Our Future bilked $250 million from taxpayers, wasn't exactly due to incompetence on the part of the government.
Feeding Our Future was founded in 2016 but was denied government grant money due to concerns over the group's administrative practices. In 2020, with a ton of COVID money available, they decided to sue the Minnesota Department of Education over these denials. The nonprofit was allegedly applying for grant money that would be used to feed hungry children (MDE was administering the grants as part of the school lunch program). In the face of the suit, MDE approved the grants in November, but slow-walked the disbursements and demanded additional documentation. The matter went before a judge in April 2021, who effectively ruled that MDE's suspicious were not enough on their own to justify a denial of payment or the imposition of conditions that wouldn't apply to other organizations. The matter was complicated by the fact that MDE had by this time referred the matter to the USDA for a Federal investigation. The judge didn't order them to make payments exactly, but ruled that the withholding of payments had been in proper and that Feed Our Future was owed $20 million in back payments. MDE felt they had no choice but to resume payments. The whole thing came to a crashing halt in January 2022, when the FBI raided Feed Our Future's offices and MDE stopped making payments. To date, over 70 people have been convicted in the fraud.
In the aftermath of the FBI raid and the revelation that $250 million had been stolen, there was a lot of finger pointing over who was responsible (aside from the scammers, of course). Republicans blamed the Democratic state government for being incompetent, Democrats claimed their hand was forced by the judge, Tim Walz called for the judge to resign, the judge claimed he never technically ordered MDE to make payments and they were made voluntarily because they didn't appeal, MDE claimed that realistically they had no choice and the matter was out of their hands due to the Federal investigation, etc. In the end, though, it's hard to blame anyone in particular for what happened, and the idea that Democrats were covering up massive fraud to protect Somali immigrants doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. MDE smelled a rat from the beginning and tried to withhold payments, but were prevented from doing so by a judge. The judge may have not had a choice in the matter, since it's unclear what evidence MDE had at the time, and what they were able to actually argue in court in light of the ongoing Federal investigation. The Feds, for their part, had to contend with the fact that frauds like this are hard to prove, and even in a relatively straightforward fraud such as this it still took them a year to gather enough evidence to be confident in obtaining convictions.
I don't know much about the other scams, but what's concerning about them isn't so much that they say anything about the character of the Somali people as it does how much more money could have been stolen if they had been either a little more sophisticated or a little less brazen; the only thing really that surprising about these is that they were able to steal so much money while being under an investigative microscope. When scams at the other end of the spectrum happen, where the scammers are using fraud to pad the income of legitimate businesses, the totals can be truly staggering. Historically, the most prevalent frauds of this category have been for Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement. While there are some cases of these frauds existing with sham patients, it's unusually easy for a legitimate healthcare provider to slip in bills for reimbursement for services that weren't provided. This is especially true in the case of older patients, who go to the doctor so much they can't remember every test they have, or hospitals, that charge for so many things it's unlikely an individual patient can say whether something is legitimate or not. Hospital Corporation of America operates numerous real hospitals and paid nearly 2 billion in settlements stemming from such fraud that occurred in the 1990s, though the total amount of fraud remains unknown. This wasn't incidental fraud, either; there was an entirely separate set of books documenting the real profits the company was making (and not paying taxes on) as opposed to the public books that showed reimbursements for services that presumably cost them money to provide. It was, at the time, the largest Medicare/Medicaid fraud case in US history, though such fraud still costs the American taxpayer tens of billions annually.
I can't take the Post or any other conservative publication or individual conservative seriously when they talk about this kind of crime, because the only time they seem to care about it is when they can use it as ammo against a group they don't like. In the eyes of a Republican, the only crime the Somalis involved really committed here is that their scheme wasn't sophisticated enough to succeed long-term and that they didn't properly insulate themselves from criminal repercussions. The CEO of HCA and the founder of the parent company was forced to resign when the fraud was discovered, but he never faced any criminal charges personally, or had to pay back any of the money himself. After all, it was the company that committed the crimes, not him, and by stepping down he was "accepting responsibility" for what happened on his watch. This acceptance of responsibility came with a $5.1 million cash payment ,$300 million in stock and options, and a $950k/year consulting position. He would later run several other healthcare companies before becoming governor of Florida and United States Senator, a position he holds today. But I have not yet heard anyone in the Republican party or conservative media criticize Rick Scott for being responsible for one of the biggest scams in US history. Instead they give full-throated defenses of how he was somehow a victim of circumstance and how, contrary to what witnesses said, he was totally unaware that providers were upcharging almost every expense. And I somehow doubt that a few Somalis bringing this kind of issue to national attention will lead to any kind of reckoning and calls for Scott to resign. So please, if you're going to look for a reason to denigrate Somali immigrants, don't cry crocodile tears about how bad fraud is, at least unless you're willing to have an equal amount of concern when rich white people do it.
I feel like the part that is missing here is that groups can be entitled to government payments at all; unless I'm misunderstanding, the whole premise of this case is that Feed Our Future was able to (successfully) sue because they felt like they were owed government money, and a judge agreed with them.
Like, correct me if I don't have this right, but the sequence of events you laid out appears to be:
Why can't the answer just be "the government doesn't owe grant money to anyone?" (And before you tell me its an anti-discrimination effort; like, duh, but I don't doubt that if it had been an obviously right wing group applying, the judge would've found that they were not eligible).
On a related tangent - has anyone else been getting the feeling that a lot of the complaints that are being attributed to the swamp, or the ruling governmental party, or really just anything political are actually problems with the judiciary? I hear a lot of leftists talk about how the supreme court is corrupt and in Trump's pocket; by the same token, a lot of right-wingers mention the ninth(?) circuit court as being unusually corrupt and blocking the right-wing government from accomplishing its goals (sorry, Canadian, I don't actually know the US court system super well). Up here in Canada, we have judges that rule that immigration status modifies a party's guilt (specifically, if you are sentenced to 6 months, it will affect your immigration claim; hence, a lot of judges rule that even severe crimes like assault warrant 6 months less a day).
I'm beginning to get the feeling that having a group of individuals, who are appointed for life, paid generously, and who are basically impossible to remove may have been something of a mistake.
Great question. I think the main source of your misunderstanding is that your conception of the kind of grants involved are different from those that are at issue here. Most people's idea of a grant is some fixed sum of money that's available for a specific purpose that the government awards to a specific group, and that's true of a lot of grants relating to things like the arts, scientific research, local government, etc. These each have their own criteria that vary, and I'm not going to get into that here because it's not really the point. The grants at issue here aren't for specific sums of money but are reimbursement for services that the government is paying for. Think of something like Medicaid—a qualifying individual who seeks medical treatment will have the cost of qualifying care covered by the program. It doesn't really work, though, if you just ask doctors to apply for $500,000 grants that they can use to provide free care. There are a lot of people who are going to need a lot of services and we can't really identify the particular amount each person is going to need from a particular provider, and we want as many providers as possible to participate in the system so that there won't be as much friction.
So the way it works is that every provider who wants to participate gets qualified and once the permission is granted they submit bills from qualifying patients to Medicaid for reimbursement, which they're paid based on a fixed schedule. To be clear, not all providers participate, but most do, and when you're aiming for coverage to be as wide as possible you make it so any provider who meets the criteria is eligible. What you can't do then, legally, is deny the ability for a provider who meets the criteria to participate based on you're own prejudices. You need a concrete reason.
Feed Our Future was a group that was purportedly providing a similar service, which would provide meals to children who qualified. Since they couldn't say in advance how many kids would show up each day, they would keep records and submit them for reimbursement. So say if one location served 100 meals per day on average, and the government reimbursed at $10/meal, they'd send a bill at the end of the month for $30,000. The state had denied them grant money for years based on their perception that they were shady, which was probably based on legitimate reasons. The problem was that in 2020 they were applying to participate in a COVID-era Federal program that was being administered by the state, and the Feds set the eligibility requirements. So while they may not have met the requirements the state had set in the past, the state couldn't use that as a justification to deny them Federal money distributed under a different program. So it was ultimately the Federal government who prosecuted them, not the state, as they had stolen Federal money.
Okay, that makes a lot of sense - thank you!
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I would say I do have a huge concern with fraud in general. Problem is many rich white people, for cultural reasons, feel morally justified in setting up this sort of fraud scandal at large for poor immigrant groups.
I'm definitely outraged with this sort of welfare fraud, period.
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I was aware this term existed but I've seen it several times the last couple days. Frequency illusion or did a software update go out about how to discuss these things?
Okay, I'll bite that bullet and say all fraud is bad, and everyone involved should have the book thrown at them.
Maybe Baader-Meinhof phenomenon?
The actual psychological l term for that is Frequency Illusion, the term used here.
I'm going to channel my inner Peggy Hill and say this is you agreeing with me.
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There was an article in last week's Reader's Digest called "Increase Your Word Power" that included a bunch of vocabulary words and underused expressions, and that was among them. /s
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It appears the senders aren't deliberately funding the terrorist groups, but rather the terrorist groups are getting a cut.
It's just political, with a Republican administration willing and even eager to offend a local Democratic power center.
Through osmosis or? Surely somebody has to send them said cut.
They aren't exactly a terrorist group like you're probably thinking, hidden with cells.
Somalia is in a civil war. Al-Shabaab is an Islamist faction in that war that commits terrorist attacks and is affiliated with al-Qaeda.
A lot of the Somalis in the west were refugees because they were supporters of Siad Barre before his government fell in 1990. Somali naming conventions are somewhat opaque to outsiders, so it was easy for colonels to just say they were teachers. The Barre government is hard to pin down ideologically, it was allied with the Soviet Bloc and also Islamist groups that opposed westernization.
So a lot of American-Somalis have family aligned with al-Shabaab due to tribal loyalties, support for Islam, local family strategies, etc.
Okay. I'm fairly intimately familiar with 'the men behind the wire' and whatnot.
You're essentially saying that they're sending remittances to Somali-residing family, who are then aligned with the terrorist groups and then possibly funded by those family members, but not direct transfer?
Yes. They probably couldn't do direct transfers even if they wanted to, it'd be too easy for the US Government to shut down. They probably do know that some of the money is ending up with al-Shabaab.
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Indeed, this welfare fraud scheme is funding both sides of the Somali civil war in question.
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Wouldn’t be the only thing coming out of Minnesota. Sigh. Reactions are as one would expect.
The political class will continue to do nothing until the problem lands on their doorstep. Western countries have no idea how to integrate people. Nor do they have a desire to.
This country needs a radical transformation of the immigration system with a simplified (albeit still strict) pathway to citizenship. I actually have a friend of sorts who works in tech and previously used to work doing malware analysis for the NSA. At one point in his life he lived in Mongolia and did work there.
One thing he told me was that the very hard and industrious working Mongolians frequently emigrate out of the country leaving the more complacent and indolent workers who are content to sit around and do whatever their thing is from within the country. He never told me where the ones who moved often went to, but a preferential policy of selecting for and seeking the best and brightest who are willing to work should at the very least be given priority in that regard.
This is absolutely not a significant numerical draw, but for a while Mongolians have been absolutely killing it in Japanese Sumo.
With Russians and the ‘stans bringing up third place, interestingly enough.
Positions for non-Japanese are very strictly controlled and the Mongolians have got most of them (entirely through interest and merit AFAIK), and are killing it as you say.
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That article immediately veering from introducing the identity borrower into 'wah wah wah red tribe making it harder for immigrants' is kinda hilarious tonally. Then the guy kills somebody in a traffic accident after being deported 3 times.
Also the deliberate brain drain thing does come up a lot, especially now in 2025 that diffusion of technology and the messiness of a lot of spots in the West means that the QOL gap between 'nice part of developing world' and developed world is pretty damned close. I moved from Australia to SEA a year ago and whilst I do miss a few things from Australia there really isn't some massive development chasm between where I'm at and where I was. Plus everybody with half a pulse/brain from the developing world immediately fleeing to the West to attempt to commandeer random laptop jobs and do-nothing middle class neutral-sum bureaucracies doesn't really do anything useful for anybody.
Reading that article Sunday, I thought it was pretty solid "vibe shift" evidence that the Sunday Times was willing to make its front page about an illegal immigrant doing actual, understandable harm to a very sympathetic American citizen. The article was largely about the harm done, the bureaucratic nightmare committed against the citizen, with comparatively less effort put into the alien.
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The worst is that I actually can feel for the ID thief. It sucks that he probably does have his ducks in a row now and that he has dependants yet can't get a stable, legal status to support them.
The problem is that the solution was decades ago, when he should have been prevented from moving in, prevented to work and prevented from coming back when deported. Or even earlier, by Reagan not making that amnesty deal, not giving illegals hope that their situation will eventually be regularized. He would be working and taking care of his dependants in Guatemala, and if he's as good a guy as the journalist tries to make him out to be, would be making Guatemala a slightly better place by his presence. But now, unless you're giving up any pretention to controlling immigration, the damage from regularizing this guy's situation now would be felt 10-20-30 years from now by the people enboldened into sticking their heads into the same trap by his outcome.
I do feel for him on some level but his presence in the USA also directly led to an innocent bystander dying (and even if he wasn't at direct fault I'd be quite surprised if his car were at the absolute pinnacle of maintenance standards). He's trying his hardest to have a 'better life', though it's not like Guatemala is an active warzone at present
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No.
I mean, once again, look at the rape gangs in the UK. Despite there being "more open conversation", all that's really happened is the UK is arresting people for having that "more open conversation". Turns out after decades of the UK pleading that they simply lack the state capacity to stop immigration, or the rape of their children on an industrial scale, they somehow found the state capacity to start locking people up for twitter posts. And they'll even let the rapist out of prison to make room for it!
I expect much the same will happen in the US. Congress will do nothing, Judges will stop all executive enforcement, the state and local government is already captured racially/ideologically. In 10 years people will behave like this was always the case. Like if you live in Minnesota, you just should have known better. You know, back when your parents birthed and raised you back in the 1990's and the notion that Minnesota would get conquered by Somalia was nothing but a Buchananite fever dream.
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