Afghan terror and Somalia fraud shows why Trump is right on migrants
You have to be careful with a country. Even a nation as vast in size and huge in population as the United States cannot be endlessly experimented upon. You cannot just leave borders open, or allow in large numbers of people with totally different value systems from your own.
That is the mistake many European countries have committed in recent years. They have opened their homes up to people from almost every part of the world where there is civil strife, war or just a lower standard of living.
The results can be seen everywhere. It is the reason why a country like Sweden — that used to be such a placid, decent place — has become one of the most violent countries in the world not actually at war. Grenade attacks, gang-warfare: these things were recently alien to Sweden. Not anymore.
It is the same here in the United States — though here the effects are more dispersed, so the problem can be covered up for longer.
But two things have happened in the past week that ought to allow any American reflect on how carefully we should treat the future of this country.
The first is the discovery — reported first in City Journal — of vast amounts of welfare and charitable fraud being carried out by the Somali residents of Minnesota.
Somalia has been in a state of war and collapse for more than three decades. As a result many Western countries — including America — were persuaded to give asylum to large numbers of Somalis.
But not everybody changes their behavior and experience just because they fly from one country to another. Violence and corruption are rife in Somalia, and so large numbers of Somalis bring these traditions with them. Speak to politicians in Europe and you will be hard-pushed to find anyone who thinks their own countries have benefited from importing large numbers of people from warring Somalia.
The revelations this week show fraud on a colossal scale. A single scheme (called “Feeding our Future”) allegedly involved some $300 million of fraud. Other schemes included the theft of millions of dollars of COVID relief funds. This included Somalis in Minnesota sending money back to their families in Somalia. And it is alleged that some of the billions of dollars that these people ripped off from American taxpayers even found its way into the pockets of Al-Shabaab.
So American taxpayers have had our generosity taken so much for granted that we allow our fund to go to al Qaeda?
All of which begs many questions. Not the least is why a group of people should be given sanctuary in the US — presumably saying they were fleeing from terror — only to use their time in the United States committing fraud to send to terrorists.
How does that make sense?
Thank goodness President Trump this week announced that he will end the Temporary Protected Status that Somalis enjoy in the US that prevents them being deported. Even in a case of outrageous fraud like this.
On Wednesday afternoon an Afghan national rampaged in Washington DC, shooting two National Guard members within a few feet of the White House. Both victims are in a critical condition in hospital.
He turned out to be one Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who had served alongside US troops in Afghanistan and is one of the tens of thousands of Afghan nationals who have been given sanctuary in the US.
Then on Wednesday we got another reminder of how careful a country should be with its immigration processes.
He was reportedly one of those Afghans who was brought out by the Biden administration after their catastrophic retreat from Kabul in 2021. He is believed to have been granted asylum in the US earlier this year.
Readers will remember the intense pressure that came from all political sides during that period to “do the right thing” by Afghans who had worked with American and other Western forces.
But in the wake of the shootings in DC, the Trump administration has announced that it will reassess the Afghans already settled in this country during the Biden years.
All this reminds me of one of the phrases that President Trump has been most excoriated for even before his first term. And probably because he was onto something — but people just didn’t want to admit it.
That was when, in 2015, the then-candidate Donald Trump said that he wanted a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”
Trump was blasted for this by people from both sides of the aisle saying that he was being “racist,” “bigoted” and much more. But the truth is that America — like Europe — hasn’t even remotely discovered what is going on. We are lamentably far behind where we should be by now in understanding these things.
This week the Trump administration announced tough new measures against Muslim Brotherhood entities inside and outside the US. It is a welcome step, and way overdue. The Muslim Brotherhood — funded largely from Qatar — has been causing strife for decades. It is an organization that seeks to subvert and overturn Western and “insufficiently Islamic” Muslim societies. And while its aims may seem crazily grandiose that is nevertheless what they are dedicated to.
The Biden administration could not tell which Afghans might — as Wednesday’s gunman did — repay this country by shooting people on the streets of the Capital. In the same way consecutive administrations couldn’t work out which Somalis were fleeing Al-Shabaab in Somalia and which ones wanted to come here to send money back to support that same terrorist group.
All these years later America — and the wider West — still hasn’t even begun to work out “what is going on.”
But at least the president’s Somalia and Afghan orders, and his tough move against the Muslim Brotherhood, shows that we are least starting to try. Not a moment too soon.
https://nypost.com/2025/11/27/opinion/afghan-terror-and-somalia-fraud-shows-why-trump-is-right-on-migrants/
