Will Flagged Somalis Become Irishmen & Italians?

Letter to Ephesians: WSJ’s Riley says Minnesota’s Somalis caught with their hands in the welfare state’s cookie jar can “rise above” the fraud scandal as have Italians, Irish & other immigrant ethnic groups. The Question is, do they want to?

That is, do the Somalis really want to become assimilated (without abandoning the best parts of their culture) and become Americans as other ethnic groups before them? As the columnist noted, “They are far from the first group of migrants to arrive in the US carrying heavy cultural baggage.” He reminds us that “Italian mobsters terrorized Chicago & New York for years while many Irishmen drank themselves out of their misery and into early graves …” But, Riley also suggests, the saving grace for both earlier ethnic groups was their overriding burning desire to help one another into achieving the American Dream, not having it handed to them by US taxpayers.

Let’s concede, as does Riley, that the Somalis come from a part of the world in which ripping off the corrupt government they lived in was a gimme. Yet, of course, that’s no excuse for the outrageous amounts of US benefits fraud allegedly perpetrated by Somalis now being revealed by investigators … and admitted to even by the wink-wink Democrat officials who knew or should have known what was going on. But, the Q remains, when will the Somalis start displaying the American flag in their homes & houses of worship as well as wearing it on their sleeves every day as the Irish & Italians before them did?

Davd Soul