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Why Minneapolis? If you had asked me eight years ago where I felt the culture wars were going to be centered I would have said Portland. Being in the PNW it was the epicenter of wokeness and it seemed like you had antifa and Proud Boys gearing up for street battles there. If not Portland I would’ve picked somewhere else stereotypically woke, Seattle, San Francisco, even NYC while not unusually woke is at least especially prominent.
Minneapolis really had no reputation in my mind, I wouldn’t have imagined it was any woker than any other semi-large American city, and probably comparable to Oklahoma City or St. Louis or something. But from George Floyd to Somali Daycares and Renee Good it has clearly become the main battleground. Does anyone have any theories as to why this is?
Democratic party machine politics that evolved over the post-90s with invitation / incorporation of the Somali diaspora, which was part of an evolution from from a blue-collar/labor coalition to the more modern progressive/racial-interest group coalition.
Minnesota in the 90s was a soft blue-tribe area in the 90s, but also politically heterodox enough that spoiler candidates or waves could reverse general trends. It was that sort of 'close-but-just-enough-of-an-edge' that consistency in turnout machines can provide a decisive edge. You can see an example of the narrowness of edge in the district political leanings table, where- for example- the Democrats hold onto the 2nd district with a D+1 margin. (Note also the 4th district, which is D+30. That will be important later.)
In the 20th century, that political machine was a farmer-labor party, mixed with the political machine of the major cities. Basic late new deal coalition politics, the gradual decline of the new deal coalition model, etc.
But in 1991, as a result of the Somalia Civil War, Somalis were designated with Temporary Protected Status (TPS). The Immigration Act of 1990 authorized TPS under a general concept of 'if something goes down while they are here, you don't have to send them back.' It was, as the name implies, intended to be temporary, and subject to renewal by the executive branch every 18 months.
Of course, the civil war didn't end within 18 months, and so it kept getting extended. And Somalis in the states could use their position in the states as a basis for getting family back in Somalia under family reunification policies. According to a flier from the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, 2/3rds of US legal migration is under family reunification policies. Vague but hard-to-objectively-assert claims are that Somalis are a prominent family reunification community, not dominating the applications but a disproportionate share (that I was unable to verify).
Of course, back in 2008 a State Department found
This, of course, is the scandal referred to by the International Refugee Assistance Project, though the scandal is how requests-for-evidence delay refugee applications from various muslim countries like Somalia, not the false family claims. The IRAP helpfully offers a help-sheet for avoiding requests for evidence in refugee family reunification petititonns. This includes a significant emphasis on challenging the legality of the request for evidence to push back against having to provide such evidence.
Anyways, Minnesota and the Somali community. The somali diaspora settled heavily in the Twin City areas, i.e. the political nerve center of the state, i.e. includes the 5th district area referenced before. Citing wikipedia to track that growth over time-
Or to reframe- of about 24k that arrived over a 38 period, over half arrived between 2005 and 2018. 2005 is about 15 years after the first TPS admissions would have started, which is also about 3 naturalization cycles (5 years from legal resident to US citizen). That broader period is itself about a generation and a half of born-in-the-US-to-legal-adulthood generations as well. Which, of course, allows them to participate in family reunification appeals as well. And most of that hyper-growth period was under the Obama administration, which was certainly sympathetic to the idea of the permanent Democratic majority thesis of demographics and destiny, and involved a whole host of activist groups- such as the IRAP- who wanted to help it along.
The point here isn't that the Somali diaspora growth in the Twin Cities region was illegal, but rather that it was purposeful. Purpose without a shared intent between all the actors involved, but purposeful all the same.
And this goes back to the point of Minessota as a previously soft-blue tribe state with a relatively even equilibrium. In a relatively weak balance of power, even a relatively small block- if concentrated and coherent enough- can decisively shape the balance of power. And not even the balance of power between parties, but within parties.
It's not that the Twin Cities were previously a republican stronghold that was flipped by mass migration. Rather, the post-new-deal coalition of labor, farmer, and city machines saw a relatively organized and consolidated Somali community dropped onto the city machine, whether they promptly pursued their self-interest in things ranging from migration assistance lobbying to, well, social welfare such as childcare. They might not have been able to dominate the Twin Cities themselves, but they could play Kingmaker in democratic coalition politics, which is how you get things like years of Democratic administrators too afraid to confront the Somali fraud scandals.
And that shift came within the broader shift over the same decades of the Democratic party in general, which shifted from a general new deal labor coalition- the stuff of the Minessota farmer-labor party origin- to an urban racial-spoils coalition, where DEI was the policy mechanism by which to reward / advance allies in the racially-self-conscience coalitions. Like, say, the political Somali community. They didn't cause the game, but they are a product and a player in the game.
But remember- there's a discrete start point to this. The number of Somalis in Minessotta before 1990 was a not-quite-0k. Almost everything starts with the 1991 TPS admissions. But it still takes 5-ish years for people who were just arriving then to naturalize, and then use their citizenship as a basis to bring in people who will need another five years. So the policy started in he early 1990s, would only start to self-catalyze into a critical mass by the 2000s, where it coincides with the Bush-era immigration debates and then leads into the start of the Obama coalition. And even then, it's not a sudden change, but rather a shift in the internal balance of the city-machines of already democratic places. But they are a part and parcel of the shift of the democratic party from the previous labor-leaning coalition of the pre-1990s, to the urban culture warring coalition of the 2000s.
So for an outsider, it's relatively easy to have not see the ground shifting underneath until... bam. Democratic coalition of progressive culture warriors and racial coalitions has taken over the Democratic Party in general, and Minesotta in particular.
That explains only the Somali daycare fraud, though. George Floyd wasn't Somali, and Renee Good wasn't trying to save an illegal Somali immigrant. And I don't see Somalis as having some Svengali like ability to warp the entire culture; Good, after all, had only been in Minnesota for a couple months, without giving an opportunity for them to work their hypnotic magic.
You are conflating causal and correlation relationships.
George Floyd and the anti-ICE protests are part and parcel of the same progressive-urban-racial spoils systems democratic party coalition. This coalition is what more broadly leads/coordinates/self-catalyzes the progressive front of the culture war, which emerged over the last 20 years as the Clinton coalition fell apart and was replaced by the more culture-war-enthusiastic Obama coalition. The Somalis don't cause this, they correlate with it as one part of the broader coalition.
This progressive democratic political machine, in turn, dominates the twin city region in part because of the Somali kingmaker status, which the Somalis support because it expands the spoils of the party spoil system. The Somalis are causal in this dominance due to their kingmaker role as a cohesive voting block, and the spoils they have capitalized on / engineered. Their influence emerged in the late 2000s/early 2010s due to the family reunification/naturalization cycle which only became apparent in the 2010s with the rise of a political Somali elite such as AOC.
The Somalis stand out due to how they leveraged the culture war / spoil system axis to stand out in their locality, which itself embraced the broader culture war in a way that it hadn't before their arrival enabled the progressive-municipality cluster to dominate to the degree (D+30) that they could pursue the culture war rather than the typical moderation for Minnesota politics. They stand out all the more as one of the remnants of the Obama coalition that more or less validated the emerging democratic majority thesis, just locally instead of nationally.
This makes for easy presentation of their political machine-area as emblematic of what's wrong with the culture war from the opposition side.
Except the Somalis aren’t a cohesive voting block. The Somalis are clannish, and don’t all vote with one another.
In the last mayoral election the Hawiye clan went for the Jewish incumbent, Frey, while the Daarood went for the Somali Fateh.
https://sunatimes.com/articles/6442/Somali-Clan-Divisions-Surface-as-Jacob-Frey-Wins-Third-Term-in-Minneapolis-Mayoral-Race
They don't need to vote with one another. They only need to vote for the Democratic Party over the Republican Party, with the broader political machine papering the gaps and normal inter-party friction as competing sub-factions jostle for influence and favored candidates.
In terms of American party alignment, Somalis are very reliable voting block.
Both Jacob Frey and Omar Fateh ran as Democrats. Moreover, the Minneapolis mayoral elections are ranked choice voting, which is a system ideal for dominant political machines to prevent intra-party competition from compromising inter-party competition.
This is the party machine working as intended.
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"Somali's aren't a cohesive block, they're actually 2 cohesive blocks that are using American Democrat politics as a proxy for their eternal clan war" is maybe not so much of a reassuring counterargument.
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