Ground Level Category Archive: Immigration

Fed is looking for immigrant successes

Posted at 10:21 AM on November 29, 2010 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Immigration

The Federal Reserve Bank is doing research into obstacles that stand in the way of immigrant businesses, and it wants some success stories.

The Fed's branches in Minneapolis, Kansas City and St. Louis are collaborating on a project looking at a broad area of the Midwest, focusing on what stands in the way, particularly in non-metro areas, of immigrants succeeding at their own businesses.

So, to identify the barriers between immigrants and banking, business, trade association, and community organizations, the Fed is hoping to find good examples of businesses and organizations that have broken through them.

The first phase of the project is looking particularly at Latino business successes.

If you know of a story that might help, let Michou Kokodoko know at the Minneapolis Fed.

Comment on this post

Pew: 95,000 illegal immigrants in Minnesota

Posted at 1:37 PM on September 1, 2010 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Immigration

Earlier this week Wilder Research put out an immigration report for the Minneapolis Foundation that noted, among many other things, how hard it is to estimate how many illegal immigrants there are in Minnesota.

That report noted that estimates it considered not entirely reliable ranged from 55,000 to 85,000.

Today, the Pew Hispanic Center put the number for 2009 at 95,000. Actually that's an estimate within the range of 80,000 to 120,000 and is down from an estimated 110,000 a year earlier.

The numbers are deep in a national report that says illegal immigration has dropped for the nation as a whole and that the number of what it calls unauthorized immigrants now stands at 11.1 million for the country. The report's authors caution that state-level numbers are not precise.

Minnesota is well down the ranking of states, home to fewer unauthorized immigrants than other populous northern tier states like Wisconsin and Washington.

Pew estimates that some 70,000 unauthorized immigrants are in the labor force, about 2.4 percent of the total. That's less than half the 5.1 percent figure for the nation as a whole.

The state-level numbers are in Appendix A of the report.

Comment on this post

Beyond the data, Wilder asks good immigration questions

Posted at 9:13 AM on August 31, 2010 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Immigration

You'd think by now the outlines of immigration data in Minnesota should be coming into focus, and a Wilder Research study for the Minneapolis Foundation yesterday helped:

--6.5 percent of Minnesotans are foreign-born and the number is rising quickly.

--More than in the nation as a whole, this population is from a broad array of African, South and Central American and Asian countries.

--A good count of the immigrants who are here illegally is hard to make.

--Immigrants tend to cluster in low-skilled and high-skilled groups, and their age distribution means they are a good source of the future workforce.

--Outstate, immigrants tend to be clustered in southern and western Minnesota in communities with big meatpacking, poultry-packing and other agricultural operations.

--This population is putting big pressure on the English-teaching industry and the state is not doing as well as other places.

--Contrary to some claims, immigrants do not put a disproportionate load on the state's public health system.

--Some groups do make heavy use of food stamps and cash assistance.

--There is no evidence immigrants contribute disproportionately to crime.

But perhaps the best part of the report is the set of questions that can serve as a guide to the continuing debate. Wilder sponsored a webinar last month that I helped moderate, and MPR News' Michael Caputo continued that conversation in an online discussion a few days later.

But the nine questions in the report lay out particularly well the hard conversation that could take the state past platitudes and meanness.

My favorites, the ones that keep coming up and need answers:

--To what extent are immigrants competing for jobs and lowering wages?

--To what extent are immigrants competing with existing minority groups for resources and jobs?

--How do we keep schools and other resources from getting overwhelmed?

--Any successful models out there for communities?

--How does Minnesota have this conversation at a room-level decibel rate?

Comment on this post

Check out Insight Now's noon-hour immigration conversation

Posted at 1:16 PM on July 23, 2010 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Immigration

Colleague Michael Caputo just wrapped a lively noon-hour online conversation on immigration in Minnesota. Check it out at the Insight Now site.

The conversation ran from food and dance to illegal immigration to speaking English to how to make people feel welcome. But my favorite comment came from a participant thanking Michael at the end -- "I usually find hour-long webinars boring."

The conversation was a follow-up to the conversation Wilder Research held Wednesday to talk about its MNCompass database on immigration and to hold a discussion that I moderated. You can now find that hour-long show here.

One of the items that came up both on Wednesday and again today was a set of tools put out by the Rochester Diversity Council. You can find it here.

Comment on this post

Join Wilder's webinar on immigration in Minnesota

Posted at 10:30 AM on July 13, 2010 by Dave Peters (1 Comments)
Filed under: Immigration

UPDATE: Wilder has posted a video of the webinar mentioned below. END OF UPDATE.

Here are three southern Minnesota counties with substantially different percentages of foreign-born residents:

Freeborn -- 3.4 percent.
Watonwan -- 8.0 percent.
Nobles -- 12.2 percent.

The state figure is 6.7 percent. So, what's the crime rate in each of those counties?

Hint: Although crime and criminals frequently enter the conversation about immigration in the U.S. (you don't have to go to Arizona to hear this), the foreign-born percentage in those three counties won't give you a clue.

In fact, serious crimes are committed at the rate of between 1,700 and 1,800 a year per 100,000 residents in each of the three (an extrapolation, of course, since the populations are well below 100,000). That's a rate lower than it was in 2000 and it's just over half the rate for the state as a whole. It's well below the rate of other outstate counties that have relatively low percentages of foreign-born residents.

These few paragraphs are hardly an exhaustive debate about crime and immigration but they offer a way to start examining perceptions and evidence, to look for the stories that might say more.

That, to me, is the value of the trove of data compiled by Wilder Research in its Minnesota Compass database. The site brings together lots of quality-of-life indicators regarding age, education, public safety, the environment, transportation and more, all of which can offer ways to guide conversations for people trying to make their communities better places to live.

Wilder recently built up the portion dealing with immigration, which is where I pulled these numbers from. Wilder is showing that portion of Minnesota Compass off in a webinar at 11 a.m. Wednesday, July 21, and asked me to moderate an online discussion about immigration with Tim Penny, CEO and president of the Southern Minnesota Initiative; Marcy Costello, a native of Peru and a board member of the Southwest Initiative Foundation; and Don Hickman, senior program manager for the Initiative Foundation in central Minnesota.

It should be a good conversation about how Minnesota communities can deal with the opportunities, the tension, the change that immigration brings and about how to get your hands on data that can inform -- worth an hour of your time. Find out more by going here. You can register to join in here.

After that, Minnesota Public Radio News' Michael Caputo will continue the conversation online at Insight Now, the place he's building as a great place to join intelligent conversations about topics affecting Minnesotans' lives.

Comment on this post