If Somalis are Proud of Somalia, Why Are They Still Coming Here as Refugees?

Independence celebrations and refugee applications don't go together

Somali ‘refugees’ across America recently celebrated Somalia’s ‘independence,’ leading some to wonder why they don’t simply go back to their own country that they claim to love so much.

But not only aren’t the Somalis who came to America as refugees while fleeing a fake ‘genocide’ and using fake family reunification claims in the 90s not leaving (though they frequently make return trips back home to buy property and run for office in their own home country) but more Somalis continue arriving and claiming refugee status from the country they love so much.

In 2024, Somalis were responsible for nearly 5% of refugee claims and while the Trump administration has cracked down on the refugee fraud machine, Europe has seen a flood of Somali ‘refugees’ with 38,000 Somali refugee applications filed between 2023 and 2025.

This is at odds with the regular expressions of pride in Somalia from elected officials like Rep. Ilhan Omar who hail their country as one of the greatest in the world, and also demand that the United States, which they regularly belittle and insult, continue admitting Somali refugees.

When the Trump administration began to unwind the TPS (Temporary Protected Status) that kept Somali illegals from being deported, Somalis and their political allies launched a furious campaign to explain why a status usually used for a country that has experienced a major disaster should still apply to Somalia 35 years after the original civil war that triggered it.

The 2,471 Somalis being protected from deportation by TPS and the 1,383 Somalis with pending TPS applications.could not be sent back to Somalia, we’re told, because it’s so awful.

The Minnesota State House delegation for Minneapolis, which has done more to celebrate the glory of Somalia’s independence than any other place in America, issued a revealing condemnation of the end of TPS. “TPS for Somalia was first designated in 1991 due to ongoing civil conflict and extraordinary conditions and has been continuously extended for more than three decades.”

The statement by, among others, Somali politicians Rep. Mohamud Noor and Rep. Anquam Mahamoud, did not actually directly state that Somalia was a disaster area, but only indirectly referenced that “conditions in designated countries meet clear statutory standards related to conflict and instability.” Is Somalia “unstable” and in a state of “conflict”? They don’t say.

Attorney General Keith X. Ellison and 15 other state attorney generals filed an amicus in the Somali lawsuit against terminating their 35-year-old ‘Temporary Protected Status’ because “civil war has raged in Somalia for the ensuing thirty five years, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths, child soldiers, extrajudicial killings, sexual and gender-based violence.”

While Somalia’s government has been fighting Al-Shabab, its own local Jihadist movement, the Somalia colonist population in America is a major source of funds for the Al Qaeda linked group, and there have been relatively few civilian casualties from the fighting with civilian deaths accounting for only 2% of the casualties in 2025 (and Islamic terrorist groups often misrepresent Jihadists as civilians, so the numbers are likely lower still) and on par with some of the deaths due to Islamic terrorism suffered by western countries and Israel in particularly bad years.

100 civilians dying in terrorist battles among a population of 20 million is not a basis for a national state of emergency or a finding that no Somali Muslim can live safely in Somalia.

The brief by, among others, Ellison, who had posted, “Happy Somali Independence Day’ cited State Department warnings about traveling to Somalia, “due to crime, terrorism, civil unrest, health, kidnapping, piracy” and because “[v]iolent crime is common throughout Somalia, including kidnapping and murder.” But how is that really any different than Minneapolis?

The brief is a fragmented mess of occasionally revealing statistics that tell a very different story than the one they’re intended to tell, for example, “as of 2019, over 15 percent of all Somali immigrants in Minnesota worked in home health care”, but dodges the larger Somalia paradox.

The question is whether Somalia is a wonderful place whose flag we should be waving and independence we should be celebrating, or a dangerous hellhole no one should set foot in?

Minnesota Democrats and other Somali adjacent pols have been trying to have it both ways depending on who they’re talking to and which argument they’re trying to make at any time.

And that’s just fraudulent.

But what’s really revealing about the refugee hoax is which Somalis the European Union classifies as qualifying for refugee status, who include “high-ranking federal and state officials; electoral delegates; and humanitarian workers” and “journalists”. A fuller list includes “district and deputy commissioners, tax collectors, employees of government institutions” and, of course, their family members, not to mention “tax collectors”, members of the “federal and state armed forces”, and “electoral delegates”.

The Somali government and the political establishment are all apparently refugees.

The whole concept of ‘refugee status’ was supposed to apply to people fearing persecution by their government. In Somalia, refugee status has flipped to mean members of the government.

That’s not too surprising since many of the original Somali refugees to America were linked to the Marxist-Leninist regime of Mohammed Barre, including Rep. Ilhan Omar’s family, and there have been multiple cases of Somali ‘refugees’ living and working in America while holding political office in Somalia.

The Somali refugee machine has always been a hoax for politically connected Somalis to move to wealthier countries. But the same is true of much of the global refugee machine in general.

Somalis demand that American government officials celebrate their country even while Somali government officials want to be ‘refugees’ fleeing to America and Europe from their own country.

Somalis are welcome to celebrate Somalia’s Independence in Somalia. If they want to claim that their country is an unlivable hell and will go on being so for the foreseeable future because they can’t stop killing each other, then maybe they should stop flying their national hellhole’s flag.

Let alone demanding that it replace our flags on the flagpoles of the American cities they occupy.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

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