Fraud, Failure, & The Cost Of Not Demanding Assimilation

Authored by Kathy Barnett via The Epoch Times,

Minnesota did not wake up one morning and suddenly become a hub for fraud.

What Americans are witnessing—large-scale welfare and child care fraud, weak enforcement, political paralysis, and rising public anger—is not random. It is the predictable downstream result of decades of policies made by people who would never have to live with the consequences and who faced few personal costs for getting it wrong.

(L–R) Minnesota Rep. Kristin Robbins, Minnesota Rep. Walter Hudson, Minnesota Rep. Marion O'Neill Rarick, and former special counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice Brendan Ballou testify during a House Oversight Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on Jan. 7, 2026. Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

To address this moment honestly, several truths must be held at the same time, without flinching and without allowing the conversation to be deliberately mischaracterized.

First, the fraud is real.

Millions of taxpayer dollars were stolen. Oversight failed. Warnings were ignored. Accountability has been slow, evasive, or nonexistent. Individuals who committed fraud should be prosecuted. And when offenders are not U.S. citizens, deportation is not cruelty; rather, it’s the lawful consequence of violating the terms under which residency was granted.

Second, the public anger is real and rational.

Anxiety Rooted in Reality

Americans are not imagining their fears.

They are anxious about artificial intelligence displacing jobs, the expansion of H-1B visas amid stagnant wages, declining educational outcomes, extensive wars, and a cost of living that continues to rise. They are frustrated by leaders who campaign on reform yet deliver very little, even when they control the White House, Congress, and key agencies.

When citizens who work hard, pay taxes, and follow the rules see millions of dollars siphoned off through fraud, and then watch political leaders stall, evade responsibility, or gaslight the public, anger is inevitable.

That anger is not racism. It is a response to betrayal.

This Is Not About Race—but It Is About Culture

This is where the conversation is often intentionally distorted.

Exposing fraud in Minnesota is not about race or the color of anyone’s skin. But it is about ethnicity, culture, and behavior, as well as the refusal to speak honestly about assimilation.

Ethnicity is not skin color. It is a shared set of cultural norms, values, beliefs, and behavioral patterns. And yes, the fraud in Minnesota appears to be highly concentrated within a specific ethnic community, one originating from a country defined by state collapse, clan rule, tribal allegiance, and chronic instability.

That observation is not a moral judgment. It is a sociological fact.

Culture Matters in a High-Trust Society

Somalia has been a failed state for decades. It is not governed by durable institutions, but by informal clan networks and survival incentives shaped by chaos.

When large numbers of people from such an environment are resettled into a high-trust society—one built on compliance, enforcement, and shared civic norms—without firm assimilation requirements, the outcome should not surprise anyone.

In addition to being exploited by malevolent political actors and nongovernmental organizations seeking power or funding, some Somali communities resettled from high-chaos environments can consolidate into self-contained enclaves, effectively recreating aspects of a failed state within a high-trust American society. In such settings, tribal loyalties may replace civic obligation, informal networks may supplant the rule of law, and a weak cultural or moral attachment to America can make fraud against public systems easier to rationalize.

Chaos does not disappear when it crosses a border. It adapts.

Why Assimilation Must Be a Mandate

America is a high-trust society. It functions because a broad majority of its citizens share common expectations about responsibility and fairness. Americans work hard, pay taxes, and accept obligations alongside rights. They expect the rules to apply evenly and believe that although the system is imperfect, it is meant to reward honesty, effort, and compliance with the law.

That social compact only holds when political elites, their allies, and newcomers are held to the same standard as everyone else. Specifically, newcomers are expected—clearly and unequivocally—to assimilate into those norms rather than recreate the conditions they left behind. A high-trust society cannot endure if parallel systems replace civic obligation or if cultural norms hostile to rule-based governance are permitted to take root without consequence.

Compassion without assimilation is not compassion. It is negligence.

Accountability Without Collective Guilt

None of this implies collective blame. Collective guilt is imprecise and counterproductive, and it conveniently absolves policymakers, bureaucracies, and nongovernmental organizations that designed, enabled, or ignored systemic failures.

What is required instead is a disciplined framework that distinguishes between identity and conduct, as well as between population and policy. Individuals who committed fraud must be prosecuted. Noncitizens who committed serious fraud must face deportation as a matter of law. And the policymakers and institutions that enabled, ignored, or shielded such behavior must also be held accountable.

Blaming an entire community resolves nothing. At the same time, refusing to acknowledge clear and repeated patterns of behavior resolves nothing either. Accountability loses meaning when it is either indiscriminate or absent.

The Choice Ahead

The path forward is not complicated, but it requires resolve.

If the national response is to deny the problem, credibility is lost. If the issue is collapsed into race, clarity is lost. If public anger is redirected away from those with authority and toward identity groups, failure becomes permanent.

Leadership requires refusing all three.

This is not about hatred. It is about standards. It is about the law. Either a society enforces the rule of law or it allows each person to live according to whatever seems right to him. It is not about exclusion; it is about assimilation. And it is not about scapegoating; it is about accountability, both upward and downward.

If America wants to stop absorbing chaos, it must confront the decisions that created it, enforce the laws already on the books, quickly hold wrongdoers accountable, and insist that anyone who wishes to live here fully join the moral and civic order that makes the country work.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.