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Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. This week, distressing scenes continue to unfold on the streets of Minneapolis, as confrontations between US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and protesters intensify. Behind the headlines, there are communities, in the US and beyond, for whom this is a generationally traumatic moment. I spoke to Somali experts and activists across the diaspora, in Mogadishu, and in the state of Minnesota, which has the largest Somali community in the US. The picture that emerged was of anxiety but also solid resolve.
For almost all of his second term, Donald Trump has been fixated on Somali Americans, making derogatory comments about both them and Somalia, linking his opinion of them to justify anti-immigration policies in general, but particularly in Minnesota, a state that is home to more than 100,000 people of Somali descent. He appears to be particularly personally exercised by Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who is of Somali origin, and who has exchanged barbs with him, taking his revenge on her entire demographic. So deep is his hatred that when Omar was attacked this week by a man who sprayed her with an unknown substance, Trump responded by calling her a fraud who “probably had herself sprayed”. But the broad reason for picking on the Somali community, according to Prof Idil Abdi Osman, at Leicester University, is that it is convenient. The shift towards the right in Europe and the US, she told me, constitutes a “political thunderstorm” that “Somalis have become absorbed in” because “they become an embodiment of the kind of communities that Trump can easily target and use as a scapegoat – that is convenient for the populist narrative”.
Somali ethnic and religious profiles also intersect in a way that makes them easy targets, several people I spoke with told me. They are Black, Muslim, and immigrant, rendering them targets for racism, Islamophobia, and anti-immigration sentiments. Even though the sharpest, most personalised manifestation of this is happening in the US, there are shades of it elsewhere in Europe, as well as reverberations across a tightly connected global diaspora.
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A uniquely connected diaspora
The Somali diaspora is exceptionally connected practically and emotionally, driven by culture and geopolitics. The first large waves of immigration happened after the start of the Somali civil war in the late 1980s, meaning the country’s diaspora is rooted in forced migration rather than voluntary professional, academic, or economic migration. Diasporas who left forcibly due to conflict “tend to have stronger connections with their homeland”, said Osman, remarking that some Somali migrants born outside the country speak better Somali than those in Somalia.
The other reason is the nature of the sprawl of Somali migration and the size of Somali families. Settlement schemes in countries such as the US would offer a limited number of spaces, for example, and so large families would split, sending some members to the US while they remained in another country awaiting processing of their applications. The result is a large global extended family. “We respond” to all events, be they political or personal, “through strong family networks and solidarities,” Jawaahir Daahir, founder of the UK-based Somali Development Services, told me. Her own family is a case in point. “I have more than 30 members of my extended family in the US. If my brother is having trouble in Minnesota, I am feeling it here in the UK.”
A globally worrying moment
Political and media discourse, Daahir said, rarely focuses on the intimate impact of heightened moments of racism and anti-immigration on individuals. “We focus on politics or policy headlines, but how do these debates actually land in homes? For many, the current climate has created a sense of heightened concerns about safety, belonging, discussions about whether we are seen as equal citizens. Young people are navigating schools and identity, and parents are worried about their children’s safety and discrimination.”
A Minnesota-based academic, who asked to remain anonymous, explained that there are real generational impacts. Some parents, the academic told me, were fearful of sending their children to schools in case they get picked up by ICE, even when those children are American citizens, which in Minnesota the vast majority are. The repercussions on child development, inclusion and socialisation were on a par with those sustained during the pandemic. This was in addition to trauma, one that is already present in families who already once had to flee from a militarised threat.
Shock, solidarity and civility
Daahir said that Somali-origin communities have histories of reckoning with far-right forces, anti-immigration hostility, and racism, but what is new is how the state has increasingly echoed the views and policies of self-organised groups such as the English Defence League. Clamping down on immigration, family reunification, and increasing deportations are becoming commonplace policies in the EU. When it comes to the US, “the rule of law” is beginning to feel like it’s not something you can rely on any more.
She did note, though, how Somali communities are experts in grassroots organising and extending solidarities, and have in fact been distributing food and pooling resources to others in Minnesota, something which she finds “encouraging”. This was a point echoed by Osman, who observed that Somali community centres, such as one set up by her very own mother in the early noughties in Leicester, were concerned with settling subsequent waves of Somali immigration, securing them housing, registering them for schools, GPs etc. Such networks extended to other arrivals from Iraq, for example, who benefited from the more established Somalis. Today, “something like 55% of the communities helped in the advice centre are from other communities”.
Prof Abdi Samatar, at the University of Minnesota, noted that these solidarities are in fact being matched and reciprocated. Minnesota is the locus of waves of immigration that are the legacy of the cold war, during which many countries such as Somalia succumbed to state collapse during a time when competing interests flowed arms and political agendas through the developing world. And in his reading: “Minnesota has been incredibly generous to all immigrants,” facilitated by the US’s decentralised policymaking structure, which means that Washington cannot tightly dictate or control state policy. Immigrants were met with “opportunity and warmth” when they arrived there. “[It’s] very important to distinguish between central government and state and local governments,” Samatar told me. The solidarity that Minnesotans have shown to immigrants targeted by ICE, and the lives that have been claimed in doing so, is a persistent feature of grassroots solidarities.
“My hope,” he said, “is that we will come back again to a world of civility and humanity.’” In the meantime, a global Somali diaspora is braced for what may come next – but it is not without tenacity and deep reserves of communal history and reinforcement.
