Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born pro-Western intellectual and former Muslim, argues that the United States must adopt aggressive assimilation policies to counter what she describes as a culture of civic corruption imported from clan-based societies such as Somalia.

Writing in The Free Press, Hirsi Ali draws on her personal experience growing up in a Somali clan system, where loyalty to family outweighed any sense of national responsibility. She describes a worldview she calls “amoral familism,” in which public resources are treated as assets to be captured by kinship groups rather than shared for the common good.

According to Hirsi Ali, this mindset assumes scarcity, distrusts institutions, and prioritizes family survival above all else. In such systems, nation-building is meaningless. Roads, aid, and public services are evaluated not by their benefit to society, but by which group controls them. She argues this cultural logic explains the collapse of Somalia and contributes to chronic dysfunction in places such as Afghanistan, Haiti, and parts of Africa.