About a month ago, I wrote a piece here on how Donald Trump, however inartfully, had raised the important issue of Somali mass immigration that the rest of the GOP had steadily ignored. As I mentioned then, Scott Johnson at Power Line has done great work on this issue.
Yesterday, we learned the sad but utterly predictable news that a Somali-American “soldier” of the Islamic State had stabbed nine people in a St. Cloud, Minn., mall (the toll would have been far worse, except for the lucky fact that an off-duty police officer shot the terrorist dead). This is the latest in a rash of ISIS-linked incidents in the community. Johnson (who is based in Minneapolis) and his Power Line colleague John Hinderaker are fortunately both on the case, asking the questions that the local media won’t.
And again, the questions must be asked of the GOP, including the so-called “immigration hawks” — How does mass immigration from Somalia benefit America? Why do we refuse to talk seriously about it or do anything about it? What unique skills are Somali immigrants bringing that Americans don’t have? How much law enforcement is being dispatched to deal with this community that could be otherwise more usefully deployed if we were not importing huge numbers of Somalis?
Yet Somali mass immigration continues onward, unabated, with all of these questions unanswered, and, for the most part, unasked. The Democrats cheer on their latest voting bloc and Republicans taking no meaningful actions to stop it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Minnesota is about to elect its first Somali state legislator, who appears to have committed marriage and immigration fraud, a finding studiously ignored by the Minnesota press.
As for the St. Cloud terrorist attack, a friend of the family identified the perpetrator, Dahir Adan, as “the most assimilated kid in the neighborhood” — further pointing out the naïveté of those who claim we just need to “screen immigrants effectively” (Adan came to the U.S. as a child, in any case).
This isn’t a question of saying that all, most, or even many Somali-Americans are terrorists — of course they’re not — nor are we saying that some will not become fine, patriotic Americans — of course some will be. But if even a small, but meaningful number of Somali immigrants join terror groups, which they most certainly do in numbers far out of proportion to their population, why do we need to bring in more?
Again and again, our politicians show themselves to be cowards on the immigration issue, refusing to address this basic question. But Donald Trump was willing to raise it, and it’s a major reason why, despite all of his flaws, he is the GOP nominee.