Since the news of Minnesota’s sprawling Somali-linked fraud cases went national, debate over immigrant crime has flared once again. President Trump has dispatched federal agents to the Twin Cities to crack down on illegal immigrants. But Trump is overreacting, critics contend: the Somali immigrant population, they claim, does not have particularly high crime rates.
Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute, for instance, set off considerable debate on X by posting a chart showing that Somali-born immigrants have, if anything, slightly lower incarceration rates than native-born Americans. Among those aged 18 to 54 included in the 2023 American Community Survey (ACS), 1,170 of every 100,000 people born in Somalia were incarcerated, versus 1,221 for the native-born.
