An honest reporter would have examined the Minnesota Democratic Party’s political incentive to gloss over assimilation problems, to the detriment of law-abiding Minnesotans—Somali or otherwise.

The New York Times ran an article last week, “These People Aren’t Coming From Norway’: Refugees in a Minnesota City Face a Backlash.” The photograph at the top of the story shows a man sitting in a Culver’s restaurant, with the caption: “John Palmer reads right-wing news and conspiratorial websites at a Culver’s fast food restaurant each weekday.”

The Times smears Middle America

The first line of the story, written by Astead W. Herndon, reads:

“John Palmer, a former university professor, has always had a cause. For decades he urged Minnesota officials to face the dangers of drunken driving and embrace seatbelts. Now he has a new goal: curbing the resettlement of Somali refugees in St. Cloud, after a few thousand moved into this small city where Mr. Palmer has lived for decades.”

The story then goes on to trash Palmer for reading “xenophobic and conspiratorial sites.”

“In this predominantly white region of central Minnesota, the influx of Somalis, most of whom are Muslim, has spurred the sort of demographic and cultural shifts that President Trump and right-wing conservatives have stoked fears about for years…

“Minnesota’s biggest city, Minneapolis, has long struggled to incorporate a growing immigrant population into the city’s fabric, but the recent ascension of some former refugees into political power was taken as a sign of progress by many liberals. In central Minnesota, which is more conservative than the state’s urban centers, advocates for refugees fear that the resettlements could be met with more resistance,” Herndon writes.

Herndon then proceeds to trash any conservative skeptical of continued refugee resettlement in Minnesota, and selectively quotes these conservatives to make them look bad. According to the New York Times reporter, the rightwing anti-refugee activists “also point to individual instances of crime by Somali-Americans as proof of an innate predisposition to violence, and ignore the repeated studies showing that there is no demonstrated link between immigrants and criminal behavior.”

Herndon then implies that the state’s 8th Congressional District flipped “red” because people in Northern Minnesota are racist.

Far-lefties loved the smear-job, because it told them exactly what they already wanted to think about their fellow Americans who support President Trump. Jamil Smith, a Rolling Stone write, took to Twitter to claim that the story showed that Minnesotans in St. Cloud were “targeting Muslim immigrants.”

Another leftwing activist, “Mac,” wrote: “The New York Times figured out what everyone in Minnesota has known since birth: St. Cloud is the worst.” Dhokay Mac.

There are legitimate concerns about assimilation

But nobody is “targeting Muslim immigrants.” It seems to be lost on Mr. Herndon—the New York Times writer—that conservatives in Minnesota don’t hate Somalis. They want the resettlement program halted in order to assimilate the existing Somali community, which inarguably is having assimilation problems. And one wonders if Mr. Herndon and his New York Times crowd—who almost certainly live in a majority white and exclusive New York City borough—would act so morally superior if the problems created by a lack of assimilation occurred in his own neighborhood.

The reality is that the often-repeated point about “immigrants committing less crime” is a bogus leftwing trope. Quite often, good data is not collected, by both states and the federal government. But the existing data shows that illegal immigrants commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime and drug crime, compared to their overall level in the population. No data exists as to whether the Somali Minnesotan commits more serious crimes on average than the non-Somali Minnesotan. There is likely a reason that the state is not compiling that report.

And in general, non-citizens commit more crime. The U.S. Sentencing Commission reports that non-citizens— only 7 percent of the population—receive 22 percent of federal murder convictions, 18 percent of fraud convictions, 33 percent of money laundering convictions, and 29 percent of drug trafficking convictions. Until the Trump administration, the U.S. Sentencing Commission hadn’t released this data for years, which is odd for a federal government that collects data on everything. In other words, the open borders crowd lies about existing statistics, and pretends statistics exist that they purposefully do not collect, in order to call you a bigot. Does that surprise you?

Of course, the vast majority of legal immigrants in the U.S.—Somali or not—are good and honest people, and many illegal immigrants are good and honest people, aside from their initial violation of U.S. border laws. But the data that does exist is not so clear-cut as the New York Times would have you believe.

Somali assimilation in Minnesota isn’t going well

And there are very real reasons to be concerned about Somali assimilation here in Minnesota.

For one, Minnesota is a hotbed of recruitment by radical Islamic terror organizations, such as ISIS. That’s entirely because of the large and not-yet-assimilated Somali population, and acts as a strain on our law enforcement resources.

Meanwhile, in the Minneapolis Cedar Riverside neighborhood, nicknamed “little Mogadishu,” violent crime has risen more than 50 percent in 2018. Authorities attribute this spike to violent Somali gangs in the area. Many of these gangs run sex-trafficking rings of young girls, some younger than 14. Again, this is due to the failure of assimilation.

Minnesota is also dealing with massive Somali-run daycare fraud, some of which is being used to fund overseas terrorism, which again shows the limits of assimilation thus-far.

Then there’s the 2016 stabbing attack of 10 at a St. Cloud mall. Or the recent story of Somali boys carrying around metal pipes, and intimidating light-rail passengers at the University of Minnesota.

Also unmentioned by the New York Times is the absolute fact that the large influx of migrants—many of which were from Somalia—experienced by the state over the last several decades is a significant reason, if not the reason, that Minnesota is largely a Democrat Party stronghold. Isn’t it obvious that this plays a role in the left’s support of continued resettlement?

An honest reporter would have examined the Minnesota Democratic Party’s political incentive to gloss over assimilation problems, to the detriment of law-abiding Minnesotans—Somali or otherwise.

Almost five years ago, the University of Minnesota stopped reporting the race of suspects involved in crime at the campus, who often attacked students at night.

The dirty little secret is that citizens traditionally known as African Americans, brought here as slaves centuries ago, and recent African immigrants of Christian origin, such as those from Ethiopia, did not want to be associated with what was, and is, primarily a Somali-male crime problem at the U of M.

Students, usually girls, were being assaulted at night as they walked home from the bars. It is very clearly told to freshman girls that they should never walk alone. Sorority girls at the U of M—most of them Democrats—were clear that it was a Somali issue. Horrible stories went around the rumor mill about assaults, rapes, and apathetic authorities. Everyone knew it, but the authorities kept it under wraps.

A University of Minnesota student story that broke the fact that the U of M would no longer use race in its suspect descriptions, wrote:

“This new policy was evident from a University of Minnesota Crime Alert issued this Monday in which a student was a victim of a criminal sexual assault over the weekend:

The victim describes the suspect as a male, approximately five feet eight inches to five feet eleven inches tall with a medium build. The suspect is between the ages of 25 and 28 years old and spoke with an accent.”

The race or a similar physical description of the suspect is not mentioned.”

So yes, Somali Minnesotans have great things to contribute to the state, but yes, there’s also an assimilation problem, especially in the Democrat stronghold of Minneapolis. People that point this out aren’t bigots. And if people begin to dabble in what the New York Times calls “xenophobia,” it is only because legitimate concerns about an issue have fallen on deaf ears, and been met with cries of “bigot!”

It would be best for all Minnesotans, including Somali Minnesotans, for Minnesota to focus on assimilating the immigrants she has, instead of accepting more. Where should new immigrants go? To Mr. Herndon’s posh neighborhood, of course.

