The Somali immigrant fraud scandal in Minnesota has put an uncomfortable spotlight on foreign remittance payments schemes that siphon billions of dollars a year from America to overseas. Although national attention has been focused on Minnesota, another state is poised to launch a crackdown.
Missouri State Treasurer Vivek Malek told Just the News he is teaming up with the state legislature to impose new requirements that remittance payment businesses ensure that customers are lawfully in the United States before they can send money to foreign countries, and he hopes other states will follow suit.
Cutting off incentives for illegal immigrants
“Missouri is stepping up by cutting off one of the biggest remaining incentives for illegal immigration, which is unverified foreign money transfers, because the economy is something that drives everybody to come to the United States,” Malek said in a wide-ranging interview with the John Solomon Reports podcast this week.
Malek said his research found that more than $200 billion leaves the United States annually through remittances, with Mexico alone receiving over $52 billion. Some sizable portion of that involves illegal immigrants, most of whom crossed the border during the Biden years.
“It has been found that at least $4.4 billion in remittances sent to Mexico have been tied to cartel money laundering through small wire transfers,” he said. “Cartels don’t sneak money across the border or throw the bag across the border. They wire it. And if we are serious about crushing cartels, we have to shut down their financial arteries.”
Malek, a lawful U.S. immigrant who worked 16 years to become a U.S. citizen, ran last year for the state treasurer’s job on a promise he would help President Donald Trump end the scourge of illegal immigration. Part of that effort includes stopping illegal immigrants from sending money overseas that they earned in the U.S. without paying taxes, he said.
“I’m making this distinction very clear: legal versus illegal immigration. I am all for legal immigration. I am not for illegal immigration. And what we saw is the diversity of the last four years, during the Biden administration, the floodgates were open on the southern border,” he explained.
The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, in conjunction with the House Committee on Homeland Security, reports that over 1.7 million known “gotaways” — illegal immigrants who have evaded Border Patrol — are now living in the interior of the United States without documentation and without having undergone any vetting by immigration officials.
“We did not know who entered, who came, and then these people are working here. They undercut the paychecks of American citizens, and then we are just left with a bill on our hands, and then, without paying any taxes. This money is going out of the country [but] we do not know to where,” Malek added.
Just the News first reported in August 2024 that on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s watch, hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars were defrauded from social safety net programs intended to feed the hungry or help families with autistic children, with the perpetrators often being Somali immigrants in that state.
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