The Virtue Signaling Behind the Failing Somalia-to-Welfare Funnel
The Refugee Fallacy: it somehow benefits a third-world country suffering from a war or natural disaster to hold an effective lottery and select 1 percent of its population for importation to the United States, where the winners will enjoy permanent government support and immunity from criticism for their conduct.
The Refugee Verity: shipping out 1 percent of the population of a stricken land does nothing for that country, but does promote virtue signaling and performative penitence among elites in the destination country to which the 1 percent is sent.
Hence, there is no sound policy or moral reason for designating a small percentage of the population of troubled countries as refugees and giving them airfare to the United States, indefinite stipends through every form of transfer payment ever conceived by the welfare state, and their own dedicated bureaucracies in schools and communities to ensure they are cozy in their new environment.
The price tag is in the billions.
Those billions are spent by the United States. The State Department funds overseas processing, travel arrangements, and Reception & Placement grants of roughly $2,000–$2,400 per person to nonprofit agencies for the first 90 days of housing, food, and orientation.
The HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement then supplies time-limited Refugee Cash Assistance and Refugee Medical Assistance (typically several months), after which many recipients move onto ordinary means-tested programs such as Medicaid, SNAP, TANF, SSI, and school supports including interpreters and ESL.
Dedicated U.S. Refugee Admissions Program funding reached about $2.8 billion in FY 2024 alone, with cumulative governmental expenditures on refugees and asylees running into the hundreds of billions over longer periods.
How do the stricken countries benefit from this? They don’t, and in losing the people who at least best know how to play a system, they may be hurt.
Instead of spending billions on the refugee lottery winners, their home countries would benefit more if the money went for, say, schools, restored electricity, contained sewage, or women’s shelters.
So why hold the lottery and bring the winners to the United States when it does nothing to help the desperate home country? Because it is easier for virtue signalers to flaunt their compassion when the fruits of it are immediately visible rather than on the other side of the globe.
Moreover, reflexively taking the side of the recently arrived lottery winners when they get into trouble yields yet another opportunity to establish moral superiority.
You have probably anticipated that a conversation about refugees will inevitably turn to Minnesota — a parcel of tundra that just cannot stay out of the news. It is getting to the point where downgrading Minnesota from a state to a territory should be explored.
The liberal Democrat politicians of Minnesota promised a Somali in every pot, and they have delivered.
Assisting the Democrats from the start was the social services arm of the more liberal branch of the Lutheran Church, which came up with the idea of bringing in tens of thousands of people from an equatorial country and depositing them together in an insular community, barely south of the Arctic Circle, to ensure that they would not assimilate.
So what happens when a high-trust Nordic culture that provides generous social benefits collides with a no-trust clan-based culture in which the controlling maxim has been “grab what you can get”?
Fraud, and lots of it.
The billions of fraud in Medicaid and welfare programs is not the whole story. The major fraud is the ultimate and most extreme manifestation of a culture that encompasses small-bore fraud at every turn, and in the long run, that may be more of a problem.
For example, trying to issue a ticket for a moving violation to a refugee has become a fruitless pursuit in Minnesota, because they have learned to dispute the ticket, require a translator at a cost of over $1,000, and force the cop to show up a second time after the hearing is adjourned for the translator.
Extrapolate the impact of this modus operandi applied to every mundane interaction with state authorities and providers of benefits. I could provide pages of examples of small-bore grift.
Recently, the national media has reported on shooting incidents involving Somali gangs not in central Minneapolis or St. Paul, but in the wealthy suburbs of Edina and Eden Prairie.
These once-red and now deep-blue rich towns used to resist low-income subsidized housing but now welcome it. The result is shootings at parks and football games, and hijabs in school colors for sale at the Edina High School bookstore.
After the latest Somali gang shootout, Edina convened a televised public “conversation” — lib-speak for insufferable harangue — on the incidents.
This triggered a Pavlovian “gun control” reflex among Twin Cities Democrats, as if that would stop the gang bangers from buying their pieces on the street.
Edina has brought all of this on itself. It is now a community divided between wealthy liberals and imported poor, with the Somali refugee community heavily represented.
The town is a rapidly draining vortex of suicidal empathy and aimless plenty, leaving a stain at the bottom of the sink.
Minnesota has become the proving ground for the Refugee Fallacy and Refugee Verity described above. Even if many Somali refugees are fine and honorable people, it only takes a small number of aggressively bad characters to at least match and probably outweigh the contributions of a larger number of quiet good ones.
Thus, importing the winners of a refugee lottery has not improved the quality of life in Minnesota, and it has done nothing to improve it in Somalia, either.
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