The struggle over welfare fraud

OPINION:

The recent revelations of widespread welfare fraud conducted by Minnesota’s Somali community expose the extremes to which antagonists of the red, white and blue will go to defeat the American dream.

President Biden’s federal policies that gave immigrants by the millions unrestricted access to the U.S. homeland, combined with refusal at the state level to safeguard the public purse from welfare fraud within its Somali community, have stoked the radical left’s appetite for insurrection that is currently rippling across Minnesota. If allowed to persist, the consequences are destined to follow the same, sad path of societal dysfunction that routinely accompanies experiments with socialism’s redistribution of wealth.

A recent congressional hearing on Capitol Hill presented in glaring relief the dimensions of the long-ignored abuse of the nation’s welfare system. “What percentage of Somali-headed households are on welfare in general?” asked Rep. Brandon Gill, Texas Republican. “It’s 81%,” he said, answering his own question. “After 10 years of being in the United States,” he went on, “what percentage of Somali immigrant households continue to be on welfare? The number is 78%.”

By comparison, about 22% of the U.S. population received some form of public assistance in 2022, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That Minnesota Somalis collect welfare at nearly four times the rate of other U.S. residents is an indication that the American way of personal success through personal achievement that has energized previous generations of immigrants is nowhere to be found.

Worse, investigations have discovered widespread day care, food distribution and health clinic fraud schemes within the Somali community that have pilfered up to $9 billion, and possibly much more, in public funds. Allegations have surfaced that state officials, including Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, not only failed to conduct proper oversight of the distribution of funds, allowing the scams to fester for years, but also retaliated against whistleblowers who attempted to expose the misdeeds. If Minnesotans find that disturbing, so should all Americans: It is their federal tax dollars that have vanished.

The recent revelations of Minnesota immigrant grift have added rationale to President Trump’s ongoing efforts to remedy Mr. Biden’s border security blindness that allowed millions of illegal immigrants to burrow into U.S. communities.

Given their determination to replace America’s free market prosperity with the socialist-based wealth distribution policies that have captured their caucus, the Democratic Party that rules Minnesota has sided with its foreign-born community at the expense of its legal citizenry.

For the party that, in effect, disparages the nation’s Founders, pays mere lip service to its governing principles and rejects the authority of its duly elected president, not even Mr. Trump’s commonsense efforts to expel “the worst of the worst” — such as those convicted of murder, rape and child molestation — can earn their approval. TV images of Democratic-provoked mobs impeding the nation’s immigration enforcement efforts in Minneapolis and elsewhere present Americans with a dreadful picture of what an insurrection looks like.

For Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin, the left-wing backlash against the rule of law deserves the same plaudits as Iran’s current struggle to throw off the 47-year rule of its cruel mullahcracy. “From Tehran to my birthplace of Minneapolis, people are rising up against systems that wield violence without accountability,” Mr. Martin posted on X.

To the contrary, Minneapolis is among the forlorn U.S. cities where distraught citizens, as well as lawful immigrants who love America, are forced to watch their neighborhoods ravaged by leftist agitators as their elected officials stand aside or, worse, encourage the chaos.

In his recently published book, “Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left,” former U.S. Treasury Department official J.T. Young writes: “Today, many cities — and even whole states, such as California — are already exhibiting the ill-effects of a rise in socialist Left policy and are suffering the resulting loss of population and businesses. Sadly, many Americans are already living the prologue of what a socialist Left’s rise and failure in America would resemble.”

The United States has an unparalleled record of successful wealth creation through the magic of free enterprise. At the same time, the trillions of dollars the nation has spent on its robust social safety net disproves the trope that the current U.S. economic system is designed to reward the privileged at the expense of the underprivileged.

As a foundational philosophy of government, socialism wars with fundamental human nature. The universal yearning for the opportunity to create a meaningful life is extinguished when individuals can simply click on government websites to gather unearned benefits.

The Democratic left’s crusade to replace the American dream with a socialist wealth redistribution scheme is meant not only to defeat Mr. Trump’s effort to “make America great again but also to prove it was never great at all.

• Frank Perley is a former senior editor and editorial writer for Opinion at The Washington Times.