Minnesota takes pride in its restraint, decency, and an earnestness that sometimes verges on self-parody. Yet that identity is complicated by the presence of one of the world’s largest Somali communities, which hasn’t simply settled in Minnesota but has clustered, tightly and predictably, with the same social logic that governs life in Mogadishu, where I was born. Anyone who knows Somali culture has long known where this would lead. Anyone familiar with Edward Banfield could have predicted it twice.
Banfield, the sociologist who conducted a now-famous study of a small village in southern Italy, argued that some societies are held back not by a lack of resources or brains but by a worldview he called “amoral familism.” The villagers of Chiaromonte were neither lazy nor unintelligent. They were trapped in a system that encouraged them to seek the short-term interest of their kin but punished cooperation beyond the family. The Moral Basis of a Backward Society irritated all the right people. It arrived in 1958, just as multiculturalism was beginning its ascent, and it offended the new orthodoxy to such a degree that critics all but buried it.
Yet Banfield’s insights are even more accurate today—especially when applied to Minnesota, which is dealing with a crisis that polite society refused to see. It’s a rerun of the reaction conflict over Haitian migrants last year. When President Donald Trump claimed that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats and dogs, most of the media went apoplectic. His recent description of Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali immigrant, as “garbage” triggered the same reflex. Once again, Trump used exaggerated language to goad progressive elites into defending something that should be indefensible: the bleak state of the immigrant underclass.
