Nairobi, Kenya, December 2011:
I am in Kenya to research my seventh John Wells novel, The Night Ranger. Wells is chasing American missionaries taken into the bush by Somali mercenaries. It’s a change of pace for him, lower stakes than his usual. It will turn out to be one of my favorite novels.
I have visited a vast Somali refugee camp in northern Kenya and the Indian Ocean coast, where Somali kidnappers have recently captured and killed several Europeans.
Now I am back in Nairobi, talking about the problem of Somalia, which Kenyans face up close. Kenya is mostly Christian. Somalis are Muslim — and poor even by African standards. Further, Kenya needs Western safari tourism for jobs and cash. The kidnappings have not helped. Kenyans would rather keep their neighbors out. But the United Nations and aid groups have given them little choice (oh, the irony; poor countries hate open borders even more than rich ones).
Anyway, I am having drinks at a hotel talking about Somalia with (white) non-governmental aid workers — they live well, these NGO types. And one says:
Here’s what you need to know about Somalia. It’s on the ocean, right? [Somalia has the longest coastline in Africa, almost 2,000 miles.] But most Somalis, they can’t swim, can’t fish, they have no interest in the water. That’s how inward-facing they are, how tribal.
The words stuck with me. And 14 years later, they help explain the multi-billion dollar Somali corruption scandal in Minnesota, which has exploded into one of the biggest stories of 2025.
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The Somalis are tribal, but they are not alone.
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. This area covers nearly two billion people, mostly Muslim — but including hundreds of millions of Christians too. It is mostly poor, but it also has the wealthy Gulf Arab nations.
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.
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(Consanguinity = Cousin marriage. Because if you can’t keep it in your pants… keep it in the family!)
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Rates are somewhat lower in Somalia, because marriages help bind “clans” — not just already closely-related families — to each other.
Still, as a book on marriage in Arab and African countries explains:
Overall, in the course of the marriage process in Somalia and Djibouti collective interests are put before the interests of the two individuals getting married.
I do not think most Americans can easily wrap their heads around how foreign these cultures really are to our way of thinking.
A society that does not even allow its members to choose their husbands or wives has a very different structure than Western societies that focus on individual rights — and the rule of law.
Yes, in both the West and tribal societies, the family is the core unit, which may be why Westerners haven’t seen this difference as clearly as they should.
But in the West, each family is effectively independent. More powerful groupings are political, not familial, organized by population size and geography — cities, counties, states, nations.
In tribal societies, families stack together to gain power, which is why cousin marriage matters so much. Me against my cousin, me and my cousin against our second-cousin neighbors, our extended family against yours, all under the leadership of a clan leader. The clans may share territory, but not political leadership.
In the West, nation-states gather legitimacy from (at least theoretically) providing all citizens equal justice under the law.
Tribal societies do not have a similar overarching philosophical foundation. They work in practice as tribes compete and cooperate, sometimes in relatively calm equilibrium, sometimes under the autocratic leadership of the strongest tribe and its chiefs.
And sometimes in open conflict, up to and including civil war, like the wars that wracked Somalia for decades.
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When individual families from tribal societies come to Western countries, they have little choice but to adopt Western stacking mechanisms — to accept the rule of law and the authority of independent political jurisdictions. Plenty of individual Somalis have done just that.
But when they come en masse, as the Somali immigrants of Minnesota did, they may try to keep their tribal structures at least partly intact. In November, the independent newspaper County Highway ran an extraordinary piece about the Somali fraud in Minnesota explaining how easily the community had reestablished itself along clan lines:
The community is the result not of a voluntary movement of ambitious people seeking a new life in America, but of the US-government’s mass resettlement of entire families at once…
The Somalis brought the language, culture, and complex clan system of their shattered homeland to Minnesota… the cultural forces that allowed Somalis to resume a version of their prior lives also had the effect of walling them off from other Minnesotans.
“The historic Somali society is a kind of Janus-faced society,” explained Ahmed Samatar, a political scientist at Macalister College in Saint Paul and the founding editor-in-chief of Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies, at his skylit campus office. “On one side there is the intimacy of the local community, the family subgroup and kin group. Here there is mutuality and responsibility and respect… But the civic culture was not part of that tradition.”
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(John Wells rides again.)
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In other words, many Somalis believe they owe their tribes hard work, integrity, and honesty.
Their tribes, and no one else.
So when Minnesota’s Democrats decided to drop any guiderails and effectively open federally financed programs to mass looting (a decision both overtly cynical and weirdly naive), a stunning number of Somalis took advantage.
As County Highway explained:
The fraud spread so widely and quickly that it appeared to have no real architect… gallop[ing] through the Somali community, which kept the secret from non-Somali Minnesota with ironclad discipline. The clan system acted as both pathway and protection for the fraud…
Through every fraud case, the Somali community displayed what Professor Samatar described as “the solidarity of thieves.” Bad actors within the community would approach potential coconspirators without any fear of betrayal.
Honor among thieves!
No, not every Somali in Minnesota can be blamed for this fraud.
But that doesn’t mean that the decision to accept large numbers of immigrants en masse from a tribal society didn’t set the stage for it. Europe has seen a similar crisis with Syrian and Afghan refugees in the last decade, though Europe has faced more violence because it has taken in so many young single men.
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The post-1965 wave of immigration to the United States has now ended.
President Trump has proven the Democratic argument that the United States could not maintain its borders was a lie. He has proven that with reasonable and politically tolerable steps, new illegal immigration can be reduced nearly to zero.
For a least a couple of Presidential cycles, I doubt any serious Democratic candidate will call for allowing mass waves of unskilled migrants (whether illegal or through dubious programs like the ones the Biden Administration concocted).
At some point, though - maybe in a decade, maybe a generation — the pendulum will swing again, and the United States will be ready to accept large numbers of immigrants once more.
When it does, I hope it remembers the lessons of the last decade — and does not let in large groups from tribal societies, encouraging them to recreate their clans en masse on American soil.
We cannot be certain all our new immigrants will accept the ideal of America.
But we can do our best to be sure they do not arrive with fragmented allegiances.
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