This article is taken from the March 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Minnesota’s “Feeding Our Future” scandal involves a gargantuan fraud involving some $250 million of US-taxpayer money. Intended to feed hungry children during the Covid-19 pandemic, it was instead siphoned off to purchase luxury cars, jewellery and property in Turkey and Kenya.
The cast of characters is largely drawn from Minnesota’s substantial Somali-American community, and as the details first emerged, the American right — with its customary subtlety — pounced on the demographic details to demand tighter borders.
In response, the American left pointed out, with lawyerly precision, that many of the perpetrators were not “immigrants” but United States citizens. Some were naturalised; others were born on American soil. Therefore, so their argument went, this was not an immigrant scandal. It was an American scandal.
It is an interpretation that relies on a core dogma of the progressive creed: the magical, transformative power of Western soil. The moment a migrant steps onto the tarmac at Heathrow or JFK — and certainly the moment their child draws its first breath in a Western maternity ward — they are deemed to be as indigenous as the oaks of the Forest of Dean and the Redwoods of northern California. To suggest that cultural roots or ancestral ties might linger is “othering”.
This logic was deployed in the aftermath of the Southport stabbings. When it emerged that the suspect, Axel Rudakubana, was the son of Rwandan immigrants, the immediate response of the clerisy was to flatten his identity.
He was, we were told, a “Welsh Christian”. Forget that his parents moved to Wales from Rwanda in 2002. Rudakubana was born in Cardiff: to mention Rwanda was irrelevant. The mystical soil of Wales had worked its magic, making Rudakubana as Welsh as Dylan Thomas. Only a bigot could imagine otherwise.
If this principle — that geography dictates identity, and recent arrival is no bar to belonging — were applied universally, its consistency could be respected. But it is not. It is applied with a rigorous, almost comical selectivity: the rules of belonging depend more on who you are, where you’ve come from and what colour you are.
Consider the Afrikaners. The Dutch first dropped anchor at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. That is the better part of four centuries ago — pre-dating the formation of the United Kingdom by more than 50 years.
An Afrikaner born in Pretoria today is the product of 12 or 13 generations of African living. They have no other home; their language was forged in the Sub-Saharan dust.
Yet, to the liberal progressive, they remain undeniably, irrevocably European. In the lexicon of the decolonisation movement, a white farmer in Zimbabwe or a third-generation British descendant in Kenya can never be an African. They are “colonial settlers”, transients with no moral claim to the land of their birth.
It matters not that they might never have seen Europe, nor that their great-grandfathers are buried under local Mpundu trees. Their whiteness renders them eternal guests, morally obliged to “go back” to a continent that is foreign to them.
Whilst the Somali arrival in the US instantly becomes a permanent thread woven into the fabric of the nation, the Dutch arrival in Africa is a temporary incursion that centuries cannot normalise.
The anti-settler, pro-immigration lobby cannot have it both ways. They cannot claim that the “Welsh Christian” son of Rwandan immigrants is irrefutably British whilst simultaneously turning a blind eye to the seizure of land from third-generation white farmers in Africa on the grounds that land being in Africa cannot be settled by non-Africans.
Why is a Jew in Judea, the very land from which his culture, religion and name originated, a ‘settler’?
This hypocrisy finds its most feverish expression in the Middle East. Why does the clock of history stop for Jews in 1948, freezing them as eternal immigrants, whilst for the Windrush generation the clock starts in 1948 when they instantly became naturalised British citizens?
Why is a Jew in Judea — the very land from which his culture, religion and name originated thousands of years ago — a “settler”, whilst a first- or second-generation Pakistani in Bradford an unquestionably indigenous Brit?
The answer is that “settler” and “native” no longer draw on geography or history. They are moral categories. In the theology of the left, the West is the source of oppression, and anyone moving from the West (or perceived as an outpost of it, like Israel) carries that sin with them.
They can never truly belong to the “native” lands they move to. However, anyone moving to the West is an innocent — a victim of history seeking betterment whose arrival is a blessing.
It is a worldview that requires a suspension of disbelief so vast it borders on the miraculous. It asks us to believe that a man’s identity is fluid when he steps onto British soil, but calcified when he steps onto African or Levantine soil.
It is a logic that allows the left to posture as the defenders of the “native” in Palestine — even when the Jew bought the land, as so many did — whilst simultaneously declaring that the very concept of “native” is racist in Paris or London.
Until we recognise this sham moral hierarchy for what it is — an anti-Western ideological weapon rather than a coherent theory of citizenship — we will continue to be frustrated by contradictions and hypocrisy.
