Staff Reports
Americans who work for a living are watching their hard-earned paychecks get siphoned off, and a new report shows exactly why their patience has run out. The Center for Immigration Studies found staggering welfare use among Somali-headed households in Minnesota, and conservative outlets are right to say taxpayers are demanding answers from politicians who promised to put citizens first.
The numbers are impossible to ignore: CIS’s analysis shows roughly 81 percent of Somali-headed households in Minnesota use at least one form of means-tested aid, with Medicaid, food stamps, and cash assistance far above the state averages — and an even more devastating 89 percent of Somali households with children receiving some form of welfare. That gulf between immigrant households and native-born Minnesotans isn’t a matter of anecdote; it’s raw data demonstrating the strain on services meant for Americans.
Those numbers matter because there’s also a stinking pattern of fraud and abuse tied to the same programs meant to help the needy. Investigations into Feeding Our Future, Housing Stabilization Services, and autism-provider billing have exposed ring after ring of sham providers, indictments and convictions, and reporting has raised alarming questions about where some stolen funds ended up. This isn’t compassion gone wrong; it’s a governance failure that rewarded crooked operators while honest taxpayers got the bill.
Predictably, elected Democrats have tried to deflect blame instead of fixing the problem, and even Minnesota’s Governor has been accused by state employees of downplaying whistleblower warnings. Meanwhile, the public sees the audits, the indictments, and the audits showing eye-popping cost increases in programs that were supposed to be tightly controlled — and they are furious that political calculation still trumps accountability. The nation deserves leaders who will stop shielding mismanagement and start protecting Americans’ money.
There’s a simple, conservative answer: restore strict eligibility checks, audit every program that exploded in cost, and stop admitting waves of new arrivals who will immediately qualify for the very benefits Americans are struggling to keep. CIS researchers themselves note that reducing inflows of low-earning arrivals and tightening enforcement are the most reliable ways to reduce welfare dependency, and voters should insist on those common-sense fixes now. Americans will not forever subsidize open-door policies that invite exploitation and erode public trust.
Hardworking taxpayers are not against helping refugees and the truly desperate, but they are done being treated like an endless ATM for mismanaged programs and bad policy. It’s time for elected officials to stop the excuses, hold fraudsters accountable, and put citizens first — or watch as the political price for ignoring working Americans becomes painfully steep.
