An ongoing decline in American assimilation and a deep fear of being accused of racism were key factors in the massive fraud scheme in Minnesota that is now coming to light, according to an expert.

Minnesota is facing one of the largest social-services fraud scandals in U.S. history after federal prosecutors uncovered what they describe as “schemes stacked upon schemes” by Somali-run non-profits that siphoned hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars from child-nutrition and Medicaid housing programs.

Prosecutors have since charged more than 70 defendants, a large percentage of whom are members of Minnesota’s Somali community, securing dozens of convictions as new waves of indictments continue. The scandal has triggered state and federal investigations, congressional scrutiny, and calls for accountability over why warnings were missed and how the fraud was allowed to reach this scale.

Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, said that the decline in immigrant assimilation in America was key during an interview with Fox News Digital.

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“Assimilation is a two-sided coin. The pressure comes from inside, from you wanting to assimilate so you can make it in the new society, but it also comes from outside, where the society says, ‘Hey, we expect you to do this. We expect you, if you want a driver’s license, to be able to speak and read English at a basic level.’ We don’t do that anymore in America. We don’t we don’t really expect anything of our immigrants,” explained Hankinson.

“There are a lot of people who are American-born,” he went on, “who really don’t like this country and what it stands for. And so, they don’t think anyone else ought to accept it and adapt to it either.”

Hankinson noted that in no way can the fraud scheme be blamed writ large on the Minnesota-Somali community, which is estimated to have around 80,000 people. He said that those involved in the scam are a minority. However, the fact that the tight-knit community has by and large not assimilated into the broader American society and customs meant that many of the factors that could have exposed the scheme earlier were not there, according to Hankinson.

“When you come from a culture that provides you with nothing from the center, everything is family, everything is clan, everything is local, then it’s almost impossible for you to understand how a federal system would work. And if your neighbor came to you and said, ‘Hey, we got this cool thing going, if you just say your kid’s autistic, I’ll give you a thousand dollars a month.’ I mean, that’s a no-brainer for an awful lot of people,” he explained.

“Even if they thought that maybe it was wrong on some level, they might think, ‘Well, hang on, in my new country, maybe that’s frowned upon,’ they’re not going to rat out the clan member, the family member,” he added.

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That, combined with the existence of generous taxpayer-funded welfare programs and Minnesota being what Hankinson called a “high trust state,” made the state “ill-equipped to handle fraud.”

“In Minnesota, these programs were low-hanging fruit. They were so easy to fleece, it’s almost farcical,” said Hankinson. “So, the carrot is there to commit fraud, and there’s no stick.”

He pointed to one aspect of the scheme in which prosecutors say Minnesota’s Medicaid autism program was exploited by companies recruiting families, securing fraudulent diagnoses, and billing for therapy that never happened, draining millions from the program.

“That is outrageous. Somebody should have noticed at some point that, ‘Hang on a minute, why have the autism rates in Somali kids gone from one in a hundred to like one in three or whatever it was?’” he said. “There should have been some oversight, and there again you get into the whole American racial guilt, which is a particular issue that we have, where if you’re an unscrupulous scammer, you can always play the race card, and that will often get you away with it because people are terrified.”

“Nobody likes to be called a racist. It’s about one of the worst things you could be called,” he went on. “But I do think liberal Americans, in particular white liberal Americans, are more afraid of that label than anything else. So, some of these scammers, they threatened to make a fuss about being targeted on account of race or immigrant status or religion. And that probably contributed to state authorities being a little slower.”

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This dynamic has also played out on the national level. Following the Trump administration’s announcement of its crackdown on illegal immigrant Somalis in Minnesota, Democratic Gov. Tim Walz has accused it of “demonizing an entire group of people just by their race and their ethnicity.”

“I can’t take Tim Walz seriously, honestly, because he was the governor who was in charge while all this was happening. Where was he?” said Hankinson. “He was asleep at the switch.”

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“It’s not a question of scapegoating,” he said. “It’s a good thing to send a message, not to the Somali community per se, but to all of Minnesota and the rest of the 49 states that this is America, we have laws, we have rules. When you break those rules, you are going to get punished.”

Hankinson added that ultimately, he hopes to see many Somalis joining in the effort to crack down on the minority involved in fraud so that they can “give their community the reputation that it deserves.”