Reported by Kimberley A. Strassel

(Excerpt shared below. To read full report, go to: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-lesson-of-minnesotas-fraud-3e66f5f0?mod=Searchresults&pos=17&page=1)

Republicans in recent years were handed the gift of California, that collapsing paragon of climate virtue, an excellent argument for the GOP’s own, better energy agenda. Their Christmas present this year is Minnesota—if the party has the wits to seize on the moral of that state’s epic fraud story: America’s welfare system is irredeemably broken.

The Minnesota story—in which Somali fraudsters bilked taxpayers out of more than $1 billion—has many ugly story lines to choose from. It’s a parable of failed assimilation and the need for policies that heat the melting pot. It’s another warning of identity politics, of fraudsters using “minority-owned” status to cash in and crying “racism” to evade scrutiny. It’s a scandal of politicians who looked the other way, more eager to win votes than to enforce the law.

President Trump has for his part sought to co-opt the story for his own priority: immigration. He’s raged about ungrateful Somali immigrants, paused immigration applications from 19 countries, and ramped up immigration enforcement operations in the Minneapolis area. This might excite the base, but it’s diverting attention from a far better policy opportunity.

Because at root, this is a story of broken welfare. Of a federal government that shovels more than $1 trillion annually into more than 80 major “antipoverty” programs (and countless minor ones)—a system too complex to ensure even basic integrity. And of a state that preened as a model of social welfare, its own lavish benefits drawing many immigrants, and invited a plundering.

The U.S. welfare debate has long centered on the failed outcomes of overly generous government programs. The long-term dependency and loss of dignity. The discouragement of work. The damage to family structure. We’ve had many rounds of this discussion: from fallout over the New Deal and Great Society to “welfare queens” in the 1990s. Today’s vast outlays and falling labor-force participation rates are proof that the failure is becoming deeper. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, the share of U.S.-born working-age men not in the labor force was about 11% in 1960. It is now 22%.

But Minnesota raises to alarm level a separate need for reset: The system itself—the government machine—is broken. Its heaving, duplicative federal-state programs, awash in forms and bureaucracies and ancient mainframes, has already suffered Soviet-style collapse. The system serves more as a cash machine for criminals than a safety net for the needy.

How do you separate the wheat from the slime amid millions of overlapping, self-attested (yes, we still work on the honor system) applications for SNAP, WIC, unemployment insurance, EITC, LIHEAP, CHIP, TANF, Medicaid, Head Start, Pell grants, public housing, rental assistance, legal services, adoption subsidies and adult education—overlaid with hundreds of state-level counterparts? You don’t, you write checks. And the crooks now know it. As Joe Thompson, lead prosecutor in the big Minnesota cases, said: “This isn’t just a few criminals exploiting the system, this is a system that’s been begging to be exploited.”