The welfare fraud scandals embroiling Somalis in Minnesota have finally received widespread attention, and rightly so. This is not petty larceny we’re talking about. The New York Times described one scheme, involving the theft of children’s food aid during the pandemic, as “staggering in its scale and brazenness.” Over $1 billion has been reported stolen so far. As NR’s editors point out, the scandals lay bare a disturbing criminal element within the Somali community.
The outrage is justified. However, I fear that casual observers might hear about Somali welfare use in general and assume that the only issue is fraud.
Not so. The federal government partners with the states to offer extensive means-tested aid programs. The main eligibility criterion is poverty. In a new report for the Center for Immigration Studies, I show that 52 percent of all children from Somali immigrant households in Minnesota live in poverty, compared with just 8 percent of children in the state’s native-headed households. In fact, one of out of every eight poor children in Minnesota lives in a Somali immigrant home.
As a consequence, 81 percent of Somali households in Minnesota are on some type of welfare — cash, food assistance, or Medicaid. By comparison, just 21 percent of the state’s native households use welfare. Importantly, the problem here is not a willingness to work. In my report, I found that working-age Somali immigrants were only slightly more likely to be out of a job than native Minnesotans. What leads to poverty and subsequent welfare use is low earnings spread over large families.
Given the level of poverty in the Somali community, most of their welfare consumption is probably legal. In fact, high welfare use by immigrant-headed households is inevitable as long as we continue to take in people who benefit most from welfare programs — namely, low-skilled families with children.
But can’t we just “build a wall around the welfare state” by excluding immigrants from these programs? It’s not practical. First, if we were to invite people to come here from some of the poorest parts of the world and then deny them any assistance, the resulting extreme poverty in our midst would be politically intolerable. Second, immigrants receive much of their welfare on behalf of their U.S.-born dependents — most often their children. Given birthright citizenship, there is no legal way to exclude these dependents from any program that other citizens can receive.
Therefore, although fraud should be prosecuted vigorously, even in its absence, Minnesota’s experience with Somali immigrants would still offer an important lesson. A legal immigration system that creates so much dependency should be revised.