For all of American history, the its states have ebbed and flowed as winners and losers of internal migration. Land booms, gold rushes and industrial revolutions draw people in, only for later downturns to drive them back out.
Over the past decade, however, an arresting pattern has emerged. If one looks at the movement of people into and between America’s states, there is a clear political coloring in the flows. Americans are leaving the nation’s bluest states and decamping to red Republican ones.
What is the great attraction for this foreign tide? A sequence of scandals has hinted at what the answer might be
Of the ten states that are losing domestic migrants the fastest, eight voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 (and, in fact, for every Democratic presidential candidate this century.) California has had more than a million residents move out and New York has nearly matched it. Meanwhile, of the ten states gaining domestic migrants the fastest, eight voted for Donald Trump.
Yet the pattern becomes markedly different if one looks at international migration. Even as American citizens stampeded out of places like California, New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey, those same states remained top destinations for the migrants who poured endlessly into the country throughout the Biden administration.
What is the great attraction for this foreign tide? In recent months, a sequence of scandals has hinted at what the answer might be: immigrants want to move where the suckers are. President Trump’s ICE surge in Minneapolis caused so much drama on its own that most have forgotten what initially provoked it: the national realization that the state was racked with clownish levels of fraud, significantly perpetrated by its small Somali immigrant minority.
First there was Feeding Our Future, which claimed to be feeding 120,000 children per day while actually serving a tiny fraction of that amount. When confronted with suspicion from state bureaucrats, the perpetrators simply threatened public allegations of racism and were able to blow past safeguards to steal more than $250 million. The fraud was so brazen that the perpetrators even sued regulators for being too slow in approving applications and managed to win more than $30,000 in sanctions from a state judge. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison never cracked the case, but did tell the fraudsters in a meeting he was “here to help” them get more money one month before FBI raids finally brought the fraud to an end. Of the 78 people indicted in the case, about 90 percent were of Somali origin.
Feeding Our Future was just the largest fraud among many. The state’s Housing Stabilization Services program, created to help addicts and the disabled and expected to cost $2 million a year, had to be halted after it ballooned to more than $100 million in only four years. Federal prosecutor Joe Thompson described the “vast majority” of the program as fraudulent and, when he brought his first set of indictments for that fraud, six of his eight targets were Somali.
Immediately after that came the autism center scandal. Minnesota children diagnosed with autism qualify for all manner of government-funded treatment, and “culturally appropriate” treatment options proliferated. Somali children in Minnesota now have the highest incidence of autism in the world, with one in 16 four-year-olds having a diagnosis, a fact which garnered great interest from the medical community and not nearly enough among credulous journalists and government administrators.
Just six days after the HSS indictment, Thompson indicted another Minnesota Somali for plundering $14 million through bogus autism treatment bills.
YouTube creator Nick Shirley’s viral footage of the vacant “Quality Learning Center” made it obvious where yet another looting operation was happening: state-subsidized daycares, which routinely sit empty while collecting six or seven-figure state payouts for children who never arrive or only pass through for a matter of minutes. A pile of easily obtained Minnesota Medicaid dollars was for medical transport companies. At the start of February, a Somali-American pleaded guilty to recruiting more than 300 others (some of whom received kickbacks) to receive bogus transport trips billed to taxpayers.
As his indictments dropped, Thompson made it plain that his criminal cases were far from an exhaustive prosecution of the fraud his office had found. Total fraud, he estimated, may exceed $9 billion.
Yet Minnesota state officials seem anything but eager to supplement Thompson’s efforts. One Somali-American who formerly worked in the state attorney general’s office gave a frank reason why: Democratic officials feared alienating a “core voting bloc” if they took decisive action. It was like a scene from a nativist fever dream: Minnesota liberals had imported a new class of voters, and
now had to ignore sweeping criminal behavior to keep it.
Minnesota may be the symbol, but it is hardly an exception. Over the past few weeks, local reporters or Shirley imitators have made the case that their own state is much like Minnesota, with ample evidence. In Maine, with its own Somali population of only a few thousand, one building in Portland has been found housing five separate home healthcare agencies as well as a money transfer service linked back to Somalia’s central bank.
Gateway Community Services, a Somali-owned company that received more than $28 million from MaineCare between 2019 and 2024, had payments cut off at the end of last year after a whistleblower went public, saying he “couldn’t fathom” the amount of fraud he had witnessed. The company, he said, faked visits to patients’ homes, billed for never-performed services and even cycled through a legion of temporary staffers in 2020 so that they could collect a windfall from the federal government’s lockdown-related Paycheck Protection Program. The company has denied the allegations.
What stands out is a new, aggressive willingness to defend, deny or ignore fraud for reasons of political economy
In New York, the signature program is CDPAP, the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program. CDPAP has the state pony up to pay salaries to New Yorkers who are acting as “home health aides” for family members. In theory, paying a family member a small salary to care for a sick family member is more efficient than subsidizing costly nursing-home beds. In practice, the program encourages close-knit communities, especially among immigrants, to treat it as backdoor Universal Basic Income, getting paychecks to take care of family members or neighbors who require little to no medical support or who aren’t even in the country.
Between 2019 and 2023 alone, spending on the program ballooned from $2.5 billion to $9.1 billion. New York currently has 171 home health aides for every 1,000 senior citizens – more than double the national average, 24 percent ahead of second-place California and nine times the number in last-place Florida.
Almost any medical dollars are ripe for plundering in the Empire State. Social Adult Day Care centers, intended to offer care for chronically ill seniors, instead recruit elderly who are still healthy and independent with free food and entertainment, so that they can get access to hundreds of millions in state dollars. A recent investigation by the New York Post found scant sign of medical care or the chronically ill – but ample evidence of $12 lunches from nearby eateries being billed to the state at $85 apiece. And naturally, the scheme is particularly popular with another immigrant subgroup, in this case New York’s Chinese community. Is it any wonder that New York, with a smaller and younger population than its rival Florida, nevertheless spends three times as much on Medicaid?
Over and over, the same patterns recur: dozens of near-identical businesses filling the same niche in a single community. Three or four or half a dozen identical companies in the same building, or one building holding a medley of companies that each cater to a separate state program known to be particularly generous and particularly unrigorous. And, over and over, the biggest rub of all: insular immigrant communities running wild with a vulnerable program, while officials react slowly if they bother to act at all.
No state in the union is without fraud. What stands out in these instances is a new, aggressive willingness to defend, deny or ignore epidemic levels of fraud for reasons of political economy.
In this regard, the best symbol of blue-state decay isn’t Minnesota or New York, but California. Witness the backlash when, in January, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Mehmet Oz journeyed to Los Angeles to spotlight a fraud hotspot for his agency: a four-block area of the San Fernando Valley with 42 registered hospices. Oz alleged that hospice and in-home health services in California were riddled with phony services, but then made an explosive additional claim: that fraud is particularly rampant among Russian and Armenian immigrant mafias.
The office of Governor Gavin Newsom, far from thanking Dr. Oz for his interest in stopping the theft of billions in state taxpayer dollars, instead lashed out, filing a civil rights complaint against Oz and his agency. Senator Adam Schiff, meanwhile, demanded an investigation of Oz himself for his “racist conspiracy.”
To be an ordinary American taxpayer, without an elaborate grift to benefit from, is to be a sucker
Once one stops fretting about offending Newsom and uses one’s brain, of course, it is obvious that large-scale fraud operations are likely to proliferate among ethnic networks, especially clannish, less-assimilated, non-English-speaking immigrant groups. And while some news outlets made the conventional Trump-era gripe that Oz’s claim was “without evidence,” a trivial glance at public statistics will show Oz is almost certainly correct.
From 2010 to 2020, LA County’s hospice industry more than sextupled in size. When not obliged to make anti-Trump pronouncements, California’s Democratic Attorney General admitted last August that hospice fraud is an “epidemic.” His office even said fraud is particularly concentrated in Van Nuys, Glendale, Burbank and North Hollywood – the parts of Greater LA where Armenian immigrants are concentrated. Armenian-speaking Angelenos, meanwhile, are 700 percent more likely to use California’s In-Home Supportive Services program than their numbers would predict. Nearly one-third of LA County’s Armenian speakers are either receiving in-home healthcare, or are being paid to provide it. The system is either being systematically and criminally exploited, or the rest of the state is negligently turning down free money. Readers may decide for themselves which they think is more plausible.
It is one thing for a government to be defrauded. It is quite another, though, for government leaders to deny fraud’s existence while its frequency explodes, to avoid energetic investigation of it, to downplay fraud even once it is exposed, and to ensure that it will continue, all for reasons of identity politics and coalition management.
Small wonder, then, that millions of ordinary Americans have fled these states, and millions more are poised to join them. To be an ordinary American taxpayer, without an elaborate scam to run or grift to benefit from, is to be a sucker, a mark, an orphan. Those states, they have realized, are not for them.
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