There are scandals that explode with theatrical outrage, and there are scandals that settle over a nation like a quiet, damning verdict. Minnesota’s autism-therapy fraud belongs firmly in the latter category. On November 22, 2025, The Washington Post noted — with the weary delicacy that now accompanies every public-sector failure — that welfare fraud in Minnesota had become “far too common,” highlighting federal charges against eight men, six of them Somali, accused of exploiting the state’s Housing Stabilization Services program under Medicaid and helping force the program’s shutdown.
Immigration is not a humanitarian gesture. It is a national transaction and the transaction must strengthen the receiving nation.
But the autism-therapy empire was something darker, and far more revealing. According to federal filings and local reporting, dozens of clinics — many Somali-owned — are under scrutiny for allegedly mass-producing autism diagnoses and billing Medicaid for therapy that never occurred. In one charging document, prosecutors describe a $14 million scheme centred on falsified treatment notes and kickbacks to parents, tied to defendant Asha Farhan Hassan, who is also charged in the Feeding Our Future food-aid fraud.
That separate case has already produced more than 40 convictions and guilty pleas in what prosecutors call a $250 million conspiracy to fabricate child-meal claims and loot a federal nutrition program. Medicaid spending on autism services in Minnesota soared in just a few years, from relatively modest sums to hundreds of millions, as the number of providers exploded — a pattern that even sympathetic observers concede is impossible to explain as merely better detection of disability.
Then came the detail that stripped away the last pretense. A New York Post investigation, drawing on law-enforcement sources, reported that some of the stolen welfare funds from Minnesota fraud schemes — including housing, meal and autism-related scams — were routed via hawala channels to al-Shabaab, the Somalia-based jihadist group responsible for mass-casualty attacks across East Africa. Money meant for vulnerable American children, in a U.S. welfare system, was being converted into a revenue stream for a terrorist organization 8,000 miles away. The autism-fraud scandal did not just reveal criminality. It revealed allegiance.
This is not an isolated American story. It is the predictable consequence of importing, at scale, the norms, hierarchies, and cultural assumptions of a collapsed state and pretending that geography alone will civilize them. Somalia has ranked at or near the very bottom of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index for years, often dead last. Clan loyalty, informal money networks, and deep suspicion of state institutions are not aberrations in that context; they are organizing principles. People do not discard such structures at passport control. They carry them with them. Minnesota is now living inside that replication.
The data on outcomes is hardly encouraging. Minnesota Compass and state chartbooks show that people of Somali background in the state have very high poverty rates, well above the state average and among the worst of any large cultural community, as well as low household income and low home-ownership. Other state and community reports have long flagged disproportionately weak labor-market attachment and persistent reliance on public assistance among Somali households. None of these are the metrics of a flourishing, upwardly mobile immigrant success story. They are, rather, the metrics of a parallel society.
And Minnesota is not alone. Its experience is simply the U.S. chapter of a much broader Western story.
Across Scandinavia, the Somali diaspora has reproduced patterns with a precision that borders on tragic inevitability. In Sweden, rival gangs Shottaz and Dödspatrullen, centered in Stockholm’s Rinkeby district and described by reporters as largely made up of Somali-Swedes, have played a leading role in the country’s gun-crime epidemic and have exported their feud into Denmark, where their conflict produced double murders in Copenhagen in 2020. On the civilian side, an Open Society Foundations study of Somalis in Malmö found that only 21 percent were employed despite some 70 percent being of prime working age — a stunning indictment of integration policy in a country that spends more per head on migrant support than almost any other.
Norway shows disturbingly similar contours. Analyses of police and court data, widely circulated in Norwegian debates, indicate that Somali-born males in Oslo are charged with violent offences at many times the rate of their age peers overall. The Norwegian Directorate of Immigration, meanwhile, has had to normalize the use of DNA testing in family-reunification cases because of widespread doubt over claimed relationships from certain countries, including Somalia. Denmark, for its part, faced its own moment of clarity when a Somali man broke into the home of Jyllands-Posten cartoonist Kurt Westergaard with an axe and knife in 2010 in an assassination attempt the Danish security services explicitly linked to al-Shabaab sympathizers outraged by the Mohammed cartoons.
Britain offers no comforting counterexample. The Mali Boys, an organized street gang based in east London, have been described by researchers and the media as one of the capital’s most violent county-lines drug outfits, with older members “drawn from the Somali community” and a long record of stabbings and shootings. The Bristol child sex abuse ring, in which 13 men of Somali origin were convicted in 2014 of raping and trafficking underage girls, several of them in local authority care, remains one of the ugliest criminal cases in recent British memory.
Census 2021 analysis by the Office for National Statistics shows that those who identify as Somali in England and Wales are disproportionately concentrated in social housing and exhibit markedly weaker labor-market outcomes than the general population. Academic and security reports, including work published by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalization and testimony to the U.S. Congress, have documented Western recruits to al-Shabaab, including a number of young men from the Somali diaspora in Europe and North America.
Placed side by side — Minnesota, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Britain — the pattern is unmistakable. Whether in North America or Europe, the same structures reappear: clan networks, linguistic silos, heavy welfare dependency, parallel justice mechanisms, predatory gangs, and radicalization pipelines touching al-Shabaab and ISIS. These are not random policy missteps in half a dozen countries. They are cultural continuities tracked across continents.
Which brings us to the question America avoids with almost pathological determination.
Immigration is not a humanitarian gesture. It is a national transaction and the transaction must strengthen the receiving nation.
Immigration is meant to add value to the workforce, the economy, civic trust, the social fabric. It is supposed to bring productive energy, tax contribution, educational attainment, and loyalty to the institutions that make the host society work. A country that imports large numbers of people who consistently sit at the bottom of every metric of contribution and the top of multiple metrics of dysfunction is not exercising compassion. It is practicing self-harm.
When a community records some of the weakest outcomes in employment, income, education, language, and home-ownership, while being prominently represented in major fraud prosecutions, serious organized crime, extremist recruitment and, in Minnesota’s case, alleged terror-finance pathways, the verdict is not ideological. It is empirical.
Immigration is judged by outcomes, not slogans. And the outcomes of the Somali experiment in Minnesota, in Scandinavia, in the United Kingdom echo with one conclusion the political class refuses to say aloud: the experiment has failed.
A serious nation does not avert its eyes from such evidence. It protects its institutions. It enforces assimilation. It sets boundaries around its identity. And it stops importing collapse faster than it can generate renewal.
For immigration is, at its core, a promise: to contribute, to uplift, to align. When that promise is broken — as Minnesota’s autism-fraud scandal has shown with forensic clarity — immigration ceases to be enrichment.
It becomes erosion.
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How Sweden’s Demographic Winter Turned It Into Europe’s Rape Capital
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