Many Americans are deeply ignorant even of the locations of other countries, but today, few remain altogether ignorant of Somalia, or that many Somalis live in Minnesota. While it used to be fairly easy to cross the southern borders, it’s more than 8,000 miles from Somalia to Minnesota. How did more than 80,000 get there?

It was in the mid-1990s that the US State Department began bringing Somali “refugees” to Minnesota, citing civil war, general violence, and poverty. Minnesota-based agencies such as Lutheran Social Services, Catholic Charities, and World Relief Minnesota had contracted with the State Department to settle them, mostly in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. The agencies — operating mostly on taxpayer money — found them housing, taught them English, and helped them get on welfare. Agencies lobbied fiercely to keep the refugees flowing because that kept the money flowing.

As early as July 2012, Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek testified before Congress:

I have been asked to testify today about the specific emergence of Somali gang-related issues we are having in my county. Minnesota’s Somali population has been estimated in the range of 80,000 to 125,000 and a majority of them live in Hennepin County. Whereas the African population represented 4 percent in the United States in 2008, in Minnesota, Africans represent 18 percent . . . .

He noted that unlike most gangs, Somali gangs are not necessarily based on the narcotics, nor are their crimes concentrated in a small area. Instead, they cover an area larger than the seven-county metro area, and “their mobility has made them difficult to track.” Now, even the New York Times has marveled at Somali crime in Minnesota that the paper called “staggering in its scale and brazenness.”

This should have surprised no one. The Third World is what it is because of its people. They are tribal and do not think as we do. Few understand the rule of law. An article written by a young Peace Corps volunteer who served in Africa explains how different Africans are from Americans.

In 2018, Karin McQuillan went to Senegal in West Africa with the Peace Corps. First, she found what the corps calls “a focalized environment.” People defecate everywhere, and the wind blows feces everywhere. First rule of hygiene: don’t even touch the water.

Miss McQuillan loved Senegal and its people — on their own terms. She also learned that “Our – that is, the West and Africa – basic ideas of human relations, and right and wrong are incompatible” and that “it became blindingly obvious that the Senegalese are not the same as us.” When it came to work, sex, “family life,” and simple relations with neighbors, the ways of these people were something “Americans cannot understand:”

The Ten Commandments were not disobeyed — they were unknown. The value system was the exact opposite. You were supposed to steal everything you can to give to your own relatives. We hear a lot about the kleptocratic elites of Africa. The kleptocracy extends through the whole society.

Though they are from a different part of Africa, it is easy to understand how Somalis had no problem “milking the system.” It was there to be milked! By their norms, it would have been irrational not to milk it.

Miss McQuillan ends her article making a point that, really, should not have to be made today:

I couldn’t wait to get home. So why would I want to bring Africa here? Non-Westerners do not magically become American by arriving on our shores with a visa. For the rest of my life, I enjoyed the greatest gift of the Peace Corps: I love and treasure America more than ever. I take seriously my responsibility to defend our culture and our country and pass on the American heritage to the next generation. African problems are made worse by our aid efforts. Senegal is full of smart, capable people. They will eventually solve their own country’s problems. They will do it on their terms, not ours. The solution is not to bring Africans here.

And yet, that is what the Left wants to do. I don’t know whether they foolishly believe they can make Third World people into First World people, or whether they want to destroy Western Civilization. For the West to survive, we must protect and defend our own special attributes and do all in our power to maintain them. We cannot change the Third World. In Africa, once whites left, the cities they built fell into ruin. The natives learned to run the machines, but not to repair or replace them. When the machinery of civilization falls apart, Africans abandon it, and life goes on as before.

Now is the time to protect what we as a people in the First World have achieved and let those who think and live differently go on with their own lives. If we do not, the result will be a “Third World” world.

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