Africana Studies Professor Francis Nesbitt contributed to the national dialogue over refugee radicalization early this year with the publication of his needs assessment “Somali Youth in Minnesota: A Human Security Approach to Violence Prevention”. Commissioned by the TAYO Consulting Group, Nesbitt surveyed the Somali population of Minneapolis and the Twin Cities area in response to a group of six Somali youth arrested in 2015 for attempting to support a terrorist group. Of the 46,000 Somali in Minnesota, Nesbitt found 57% of those surveyed living in poverty. His assessment cites poverty, racism and Islamophobia as key factors in the radicalization of refugees.
“They feel like they’re not Americans,” Nesbitt said.
Nesbitt advocates for a ‘Human Security’ approach to quelling radicalization in Islamic communities. Talking to police, focus groups and school administrators, he found that a community-invasion or espionage approach only exacerbated tensions.
“The Bush administration’s approach created resentment in the Somali community,” Nesbitt said; in Minneapolis, he discovered a cycle of law enforcement targeting and harassing youth, and youth responding with radical sentiments.
The 2015 arrests of young Somali men aiding a terrorist group follow a massive 2010 high school walkout, in which hundreds of Somali students protested both physical and verbal abuse from classmates. The history of Minneapolis’s refugee community is a brief and tumultuous one; his study found 50% of respondents to be born outside of the U.S. and 53% subsisting on a high school education or less, with no other ethnic group in Minneapolis suffering the same degree of poverty. With such a delicate socio-political environment, Nesbitt denounces aggressive techniques.
“It’s getting to know the community, and then solving the problems together. Not coming in like an invading force,” Nesbitt said of the ideal approach to community policing—or rather, community self-policing.
In response to the immense adversity the Minneapolis Somali community is faced with, Nesbitt prescribed several amenities both social and economic in his needs assessment. Based on the concerns of respondents, he recommended the government invest in language training, job training, after school programs, tutoring and ESL programs to ensure Somali children and adults are equipped with the tools to be successful in America. The capacity for the Minneapolis Somali to eventually sustain these programs themselves was imperative to Nesbitt. Sharing Somali culture was another priority, in the hopes that other ethnicities would understand their resident refugees rather than fear them, and allow them to wholly integrate into American society.
The children robbed by radicalization, however, remain missing from the lives of Somali mothers and fathers. In 2008, nearly 20 teenagers and young adults disappeared over the course of a day. Later they, discovered their children had fled to fight in the ongoing War in Somalia. In his needs assessment, Nesbitt writes that poverty and racism drive “some Somali youth away from the mainstream… and into the margins of society.” Somali are alienated in schools, where fights over cultural differences are common and suspensions are even more so—90% of Nesbitt’s student respondents had been suspended. The parents of the youth radicalized in 2008 felt the extent of this alienation firsthand upon realizing that their children’s plane tickets had probably been bought by an extremist group. Two of the children perished in suicide bombings. They were new recruits to ISIL.
“Somalis are perceived as pirates and terrorists,” a Somali youth told Nesbitt in September of 2015, and Nesbitt believes this perception to incite Somalis to radicalize. One of the ISIL fighters’ fathers recounted to Nesbitt the fierce discrimination his son experienced in Minneapolis. While at a McDonalds, a man spit on his son for his ethnicity.
Nesbitt is hopeful, however, that with the Obama administration gradually applying the Human Security approach to community safety, Somali refugee communities will be secure from further infiltration, and eventually Somali youth will have equal opportunities to achieve success.
“The goal is to get them to run for office eventually. The goal is to make them feel like Americans—which they are!” Nesbitt said.
In 2006, Nesbitt conducted a similar needs assessment on San Diego. Although San Diegan Somali did not face the degree of struggle Minnesotan Somali did, he found many of the obstacles to refugee integration similar.
When asked about the recent incident of assailants tearing the hijab from a woman’s head on San Diego State University’s campus, Nesbitt responded by advising the following to students, faculty and San Diegans:
“You need to educate yourselves on what Islam is, and about the new refugee communities coming into the United States. I would recommend to the administration to set up a cultural awareness program.”
He suggests the cultural awareness program to include undeniable Somali dishes and the mystical poetry of Somali Sufi Islam.
Richard Freeland 