The Michael Knowles Show - December 13, 2025


What Somalia Did For America In 5 Mins

Hosted by
Michael Knowles
Mentioned
Christopher Columbus Christopher Ruffo Pramila Jayapal Ryan Thorpe
Ep. 1874 - Alleged Charlie Kirk Assassin Smirks During First Court Hearing Ep. 1875 - UPDATE： Two Mass Shootings, Brown Killer Still On The Loose

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

133.81

Word count

784

Sentence count

46

Harmful content

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Somalis have been in the United States for almost as long as they have been here, but they ve never built much of anything in the country they call home. In other words, they didn t build this country. They were not here when it was founded, and they weren t here when the country was founded.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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00:00:57.480 Democrat Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal recently claimed that immigrants from Somalia built this country, the United States of America.
00:01:07.200 Immigrants have built this country from all over the world, Somalia, India, wherever they're from.
00:01:13.140 It's a strange claim, since the Americas were discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492, settled by the Virginia Company at Jamestown in 1607,
00:01:22.200 and settled in New England by the Pilgrims on the Mayflower in 1620, founded as a cohesive nation through the Revolutionary War between 1775 and 1783,
00:01:31.180 and governed by the Constitution, which was ratified in 1788, all of which occurred between 132 and 428 years before the first documented Somali arrived in the 1920s.
00:01:43.960 When Somalis did finally make it over here in the 1920s, it was not by the millions, or by the thousands, or even by the hundreds.
00:01:52.100 It was by the dozens.
00:01:53.920 Handfuls of sailors so minuscule that they barely even appear in the historical record.
00:01:59.680 In the 1950s, as Somali territories moved toward independence after decades of colonial government by the British, the French, and the Italians,
00:02:07.700 some Somali students attended American universities.
00:02:11.520 Again, we're talking about a vanishingly small number of Somalis visiting and studying in the United States.
00:02:18.220 Even after the Hart-Seller Act of 1965 radically transformed America's immigration system,
00:02:24.060 inaugurating the policy of mass migration that persists to this day, Somalis still barely came to the United States.
00:02:30.300 In 1969, the Somali Republic collapsed after only nine years of existence, giving way to the Marxist-Leninist Somali Democratic Republic.
00:02:39.480 Even then, only a minuscule number of Somalis made it to America.
00:02:43.680 By 1990, one year before the collapse of the Somali Democratic Republic, fewer than 2,100 Somali natives lived in the United States.
00:02:52.220 That all changed in 1991, when civil war and state failure sent hundreds of thousands of Somalis fleeing.
00:03:01.140 The U.S. had adopted a new policy, welcoming political refugees in 1980,
00:03:06.160 over two centuries after the founding of the American nation and 360 years after the landing of the Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor, for those who were keeping count.
00:03:13.980 So, by 2011, nearly 100,000 Somalis had been welcomed into the United States as refugees.
00:03:22.200 What exactly did they build in America? 0.67
00:03:24.860 They didn't sign the Declaration of Independence.
00:03:27.300 They didn't build our military or found any universities or make any of the discoveries or invent any of the inventions
00:03:34.080 that made America a global superpower and gave us the American century.
00:03:38.440 They weren't even here when all that stuff happened.
00:03:41.140 But that doesn't mean they haven't built anything.
00:03:43.420 When Somalis began arriving in the 1990s and 2000s, they built mosques and Islamic centers and Quranic schools.
00:03:53.400 They opened halal shops and grocery stores that sent remittances back to Somalia.
00:04:00.060 Beyond these legal, or at least semi-legal, businesses, a major source of remittances to Somalia has been the American taxpayer.
00:04:07.960 Because the most impressive institution that Somalis have built in the United States is the kind of community group that perpetrated one of the most expansive cases of welfare fraud in American history. 1.00
00:04:20.240 Thanks to reporting by Ryan Thorpe and Christopher Rufo at City Journal, we now know that Somali criminals stole billions of dollars in taxpayer dollars during just a single gubernatorial administration in Minnesota alone. 0.74
00:04:33.960 Much of that money went straight back to Somalia, with at least some of it ending up in the hands of the Islamic terrorist group Al-Shabaab.
00:04:41.860 According to a 2024 report, remittances from abroad, and especially from the United States, today account for between 30 and 50 percent of the Somalian economy.
00:04:51.560 In other words, Somalis didn't build America. 1.00
00:04:55.780 They've never really contributed anything to America.
00:04:58.740 But they have managed to take, steal, and transfer enough wealth from America that, inasmuch as Somalia exists today as a nation at all, America built Somalia. 0.90
00:05:21.560 For more information, visit www.fema.org