Eighty-One Percent of the Households

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The claim is that Somali immigrants are hard-working. In Minnesota, where most of them live, the Census numbers say something narrower. A large share are in the labor force. A larger share of their households are on welfare. And a documented slice of the community has been charged with stealing more than a billion dollars from the programs that were supposed to feed children, house the unstable, and treat autism. The hard work, where it exists, has not produced the independence the slogan promises. The fraud has produced indictments.

The welfare count

A report drawing on ten years of the American Community Survey, 2014 through 2023, put the household figures for Minnesota this way. Fifty-four percent of Somali-headed households receive food stamps. Seventy-three percent have at least one member on Medicaid. Twenty-seven percent are on cash welfare. Altogether, 81 percent of Somali households use some form of those benefits. The comparable rates for native Minnesota households are 7 percent on food stamps, 18 percent with someone on Medicaid, 6 percent on cash, and 21 percent on any of it. Among Somali households with children the welfare rate is 89 percent. Fifty-two percent of the children in Somali immigrant households live in poverty, against 8 percent of children in native-headed homes. One of every eight poor children in the state lives in a Somali immigrant household.

A state demographer’s look at 2019–2023 data for people of Somali ancestry in Minnesota, including the U.S.-born, found 60 percent had received food stamps in the prior year, 78 percent had Medicaid, and 84 percent had one or the other or cash assistance. Eight percent of those fifteen and older reported public-assistance income. The programs are means-tested. High use follows high poverty. The poverty is not in dispute.

The work count

Labor-force participation among Somalis in Minnesota is not low. Census estimates for 2024 put it near 72 percent for the Somali population sixteen and older, meaning about 28 percent are neither working nor looking. The state’s overall rate has been around 68 percent. Working-age Somali immigrants are only slightly more likely to be without a job than native Minnesotans. A claim that 92 percent of them do not work is wrong on the numbers. They work. They work in home health care, retail, manufacturing, food processing, and transportation. Some own small businesses. The participation rate does not settle the question the welfare numbers raise.

What settles it is earnings. Thirty-nine percent of working-age Somalis have no high-school diploma, against 5 percent of natives. Fifty-eight percent of working-age Somalis do not speak English very well. Households are larger. A worker with limited English and limited schooling, supporting more children, does not clear the poverty line that triggers food stamps and Medicaid. The welfare system was built for that household. It has been used by that household at four times the native rate. Working and not needing the taxpayer are different facts. The first is common. The second is not.

The fraud that was charged

The welfare use would be high without a single false claim. The false claims have been large. Federal prosecutors have described more than a billion dollars stolen across schemes that billed the state for meals that were not served, autism therapy that was not delivered, and housing stabilization that was not provided. In the meals case alone, Feeding Our Future and its sites took roughly 250 to 300 million dollars in pandemic child-nutrition money. Autism claims in one program rose from about a million dollars in 2017 to more than 220 million in 2024. The housing stabilization program paid out 302 million dollars over four and a half years against a budgeted expectation near 12 million; prosecutors have said most of the spending was fraudulent.

Of the 86 people charged in the meals, housing, and autism cases, all but eight are of Somali ancestry, according to the prosecutors’ accounting. Most are citizens. Fifty-nine had been convicted in the broader set of plots by late 2025, with more charged since, including an eighty-first defendant in the meals case this month. The money bought houses, cars, and wire transfers overseas. The state’s Scandinavian safety net assumed claimants would treat the aid as a net. A network inside one diaspora treated it as an open account. That is not the whole community of 80,000 to 100,000. It is a large enough piece of the charged defendants that the reputation damage is no longer theoretical.

Why the gap persists

They do not fail to work because a statute forbids it. They fail to earn enough, in enough households, because the skills they arrived with do not match the wages that end the eligibility. Refugee admissions in the 1990s brought people from a collapsed state with low formal schooling and little English. Chain migration and births enlarged the group. The welfare rules count the children and the income, and the children and the income qualify. Assimilation on language and credentials has been slow; nearly half of those here more than a decade still do not speak English very well. A labor-force rate that matches the native rate, paired with a poverty rate that does not, is the predictable result of admitting large numbers of low-skilled people into a high-benefit state and then measuring success by whether they clock in.

The hard-working line is true of the participation rate and false of the fiscal result. Eighty-one percent of the households are on some form of welfare. A billion dollars has been charged as stolen from the programs that serve them. The work that is being done has not closed the gap the numbers describe. The numbers are from the Census and the indictments. They do not require a slogan to be read.