"Somalis Gonna Somali. They’re A Deeply Tribal People"?

Intellectual welterweight Glenn Reynolds posted this on Instapundit, linking to a substack essay by Alex Berenson, who is smarter, although I'm not always sure by how much. Berenson says,

It is impossible to understand the massive chunk of the world that runs from Morocco 4,000 miles east to Pakistan and south across Africa without realizing the importance of tribes.

. . . What it shares more than anything is a commitment to tribe as the center of identity. In Arab and Muslim countries, cousin marriage helps sustain tribal identity; marriages between cousins account for two-thirds of all marriages in Pakistan and nearly as many in some Arab countries.

Wait a moment. Let's rewrite the first sentence: "It is impossible to understand the massive chunk of the world that runs 10,500 miles from the Bering Strait to Cape Horn in the pre-Colombian era without realizing the importance of tribes." This might sound appealing to Ivy Leaguers, but it's a meaningless statement. By the same token, I asked Chrome AI mode, "Did the names of ancient Romans have a tribal component?" It answered,

Yes, formal Roman names included a tribal component, though it was primarily used for administrative and political identification rather than daily address.

. . . The tribe component is distinct from the nomen, which designated a person’s gens or clan (e.g., the Julii or Cornelii).

While early tribes were geographical or based on old family territories, they eventually became administrative units that did not strictly reflect where a person lived.

Membership in a tribe served as prima facie proof of Roman citizenship.

As Glenn Reynolds would put it, Indigenous Americans gonna Indigenous American. Ancient Romans gonna Ancient Roman; any statement like this is a tautology, and Alex Berenson has said precisely nothing, but I'm sure Cornell undergraduates would disagree. And Glenn Reynolds is a brilliant law professor, huh?

If "tribalism" doesn't explain the penchant of Somali immigrants in large groups to commit fraud, what does? Here's another data point, linked just a few posts down at Instapundit:

Nice work @CarleenJohn1970.

One of our local reporters hitting the ground asking questions.

Give her a follow! https://t.co/JJiAq5pmyb pic.twitter.com/6WOuk0NGUS

— PNW Conservative (@PNWConservative) December 30, 2025

The impllcation might be that one group of Somalis in Washington State, many hundreds of miles from Minnesota, is doing the same sort of thing because they're Somalis, which means they're "tribal", or something like that. But this tells us nothing at all, except that like many other groups all over the world and throughout history, they're "tribal". This does nothing to explain day care centers without children.

I think a better approach is what I suggested in yesterday's post, that "faith-based NGOs" appear to have had a uniform agenda of sponsoring large-scale immigration by specific national groups into designated communities in the US interior, to the point that they're disruptive of the communities they target. This includes Venezuelans to Aurora, CO and El Paso, TX; Haitians to Springfield, OH and Charleroi, PA; and now Somalis to places like Minneapolis, MN, St Cloud, MN, and Federal Way, WA.

The NGOs' overall strategy, which appears to be uniform across the dozen or so biggest, appears to have been to industrialize the Refugee Act of 1980, which helpfully redefined "refugee" for the purposes of US immigration:

The 1980 Refugee Act aligned U.S. law with language used by the United Nations, defining a refugee as anyone who is unable or unwilling to return to their home country because of “persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution” due to race, membership in a particular social group, political opinion, religion, or national origin.

Importantly, this has been our most inclusive definition to date, removing conditions based on people’s nationalities, the timing of their displacement, or the countries from which they were forced to seek refuge.

The Refugee Act created the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) to rigorously vet refugees abroad using consistent criteria, and the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) to ensure that new arrivals are provided with the services needed to become self-sufficient as quickly as possible. Funding was provided to contract with a network of vetted and monitored community-based agencies like IINE to provide welcome, housing assistance, connection to federal benefits and local services, English language training, cultural orientation, career support, and legal services.

Before these offices were established, refugee admissions and resettlement could be ad hoc and inconsistent, subject to debate during an active crisis and resulting in different arrangements for different populations. USRAP and ORR were an investment in fairness, better planning, and smoother integration.

In other words, a new, much more inclusive definition of "refugee" was linked with funding, primarily to NGOs, that provided a wide range of social services to "refugee" groups. Some, like Somalis, were identified and brought in en masse to designated destinations where they could efficiently receive benefits via those same NGOs. New groups, like Venezuelans, Haitians, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, and so forth, were desingated as a result of the separate Immigration Act of 1990.

This instituted a range of liberalization measures that have recently become controversial, including H1B visas, Temporary Protected Status for certain groups not qualifying as "refugees", and a diversity visa lottery, which admitted the Brown shooter Claudio Neves Valente.

The Immigration Act of 1990 helped permit the entry of 20 million people over the next two decades, the largest number recorded in any 20 year period since the nation’s founding.

TemporarY Protected Status greatly increased the populations of indigent immigrants who would require the industrialized, mass resettlement services the NGOs provided. On one hand, the mass immigrant groups were identified, recruited, flown in, and resettled as cohesive cultural communities in small cities in the US interior that could be given efficiently customized treatment. Another advantage was that, resettled according to this paradigm, they received services in their native language, reducing the incentive to assimilate or learn English.

The services the NGOs offered, as we saw in earlier instances like Springfield, OH and Aurora, CO, were wide-ranging. They included autos made available without licenses, registration, or insurance, and apartment units that could be rented from slumlords without reference to local regulations. They certainly included job training, English language, day care, medical, and legal services that could be billed against federal aid without the need to verify whether the individuals were actually receiving those services.

These are features of the whole NGO industrialized resettlement paradigm, which disincentivize assimilation and maintain migrant populations in a semi-permanent depdendent status, because this benefits the NGOs. Large-scale fraud is going to be an ongoing feature of these programs; it has little to do with the particular qualities of the migrant communities. "Tribal" is a meaningless term that does nothing to identify any specific problem.

The ultimate solution is going to have to be to rewrite the legislation that's created the current environment. Executive orders that stop one or another point problem, or temporary stopping of aid to one or another state, won't solve problems that have 45 or 35 years legislative history.