Revelations of subsidized daycare fraud in Minnesota have come in waves. The latest, biggest came with the Nick Shirley video, covered here on Wednesday. Reactions to it have been all over the map.
Tarl E. Warwick, aka Styxhexenhammer666, declared the revelations just “the tip of the iceberg” and demonstrated as accounting fact, not fancy, while hordes of daycare workers on TikTok said the reporting by the “untrained” “mama’s boy” Mr. Shirley was completely without merit. Reinforcing anti-Shirley reaction, X user @slimebeasts expressed scorn with some actual back-up:
For those with short attention spans or little time to sit down and watch something — I went ahead and ended Nick Shirley’s credibility in under 10 minutes, showing dishonesty in his Minnesota Somali Fraud video.
@slimebeasts’ X post, linking to a YouTube critique (December 28, 2024).
The memes attacking Mr. Shirley run the gamut, but this is a good example:
Overall, the “mama’s boy” label seems tied to his mother’s role in his videos (she appears in some and is a right-wing influencer herself). Criticisms of him being “untrained” focus on his background in pranks and satire rather than journalism, and claims he got the story wrong emphasize that state inspections found no fraud in many centers.
Meanwhile, the story expands beyond Minnesota borders. Peter St. Onge (@stonge) synopsizes the scope, saying that for every three Somalians in the country there is one day care center. A flurry of posting about Somalian activity in Washington State uncovered quite a colorful mess of apparent fraud, one claim showing how two Somalian sisters set up day care centers in each of their homes — their daycare being confined to servicing each other’s children! The number of taxpayer-funded Somalian daycare centers in Washington State surprised many Washingtonians:
This sort of thing is not limited to just a few states, apparently. And in one case in Arizona, a “Learing Center” echo was identified:
Amidst many accusations and counter-accusations, the most astounding was made against Somalia’s ambassador to the UN, Abukar Dahir Osman, saying he is also a daycare administrator in Ohio. That is not true. Technically. Osman lived and worked in Ohio for many years before returning to a Somali diplomatic role. His pre-diplomatic career included a position as managing director/statutory agent for Progressive Health Care Services Inc., a Cincinnati-based home healthcare company, which overlapped with the start of his UN role in 2019. He also worked as a supervisor in the Adult Medicaid Unit at the Franklin County Department of Job and Family Services (2007 – 2012).
In case you are wondering, it is not uncommon for foreign countries to tap their diaspora members to high diplomatic posts, including UN roles. For smaller or developing nations, it’s a practical way, the rationale runs, to staff missions with skilled professionals who might not be available domestically.
But it is also worth mentioning that home health care, which Abukar Dahir Osman was associated with, while distinct from daycare, has also been implicated in the scams that have so far focused on subsidized daycare.
If this is all legit, it appears that America has been importing a whole lot of social workers from Somalia!
And wherever this story eventually ends up at, it will remain the case that the U.S. brought in people from a distant land who went on various forms of welfare and who have then found work (most are unemployed) in those government and contracting agencies providing various forms of “welfare” services.
The legal framework under which they arrived was the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), established by the Refugee Act of 1980. The Somalians are not, on the whole, illegal aliens. Though they started as a trickle in the 1980s and ’90s, under the Bush and Obama Administrations of the aughts and teens it ballooned. You might say. But caution: this was part of broader increases in overall refugee ceilings (from ~70,000 – 80,000 annually early on, to 85,000 in FY2016 and planned 110,000 for FY2017) due to global crises. Peaks occurred in later years (e.g., ~9,000 in 2016), but this built on prior decades’ flows — not a sudden new initiative from, say, the Obama Administration.
While the migrant story goes way back, this fraud story itself goes back, too; it’s not just a recent phenomenon. But more on that later.
