This is the first in an occasional MinnPost Voices series on various attacks depicting Minnesota as a failed state.
Over these hard winter months, President Donald Trump, his top officials and their army of heavily armed and masked ICE troops — joined by local and national right-wing politicians and influencers — have piled up unprecedented insult and injury to Minnesota’s immigrants of color, shooting to death two of their white defenders on the streets of Minneapolis.
Throughout this withering defamation and persecution, our half-million foreign-born neighbors quietly have been doing what the Republican-leaning Minnesota Chamber of Commerce documented in an extraordinarily positive report released just last year.
Under constant siege even before the federal invasion, immigrants have been providing almost all our population increase and much of our economic growth. Also: paying more in taxes than they receive in government benefits; outperforming native-born whites in labor force participation; toiling in physically demanding jobs that native white Minnesotans aren’t taking; roofing our houses, milking our cows, and nursing our elderly, thus sustaining agribusiness, health care, construction, manufacturing and service industries, the pillars of our economy; inventing stuff, registering patents and improving our state’s reputation for innovation and entrepreneurialism; becoming more educated and assimilated with each generation; and enriching our arts and cultural scene, broadening our minds and strengthening our connections to the rest of the world.
Immigration by the numbers
Minnesota stands well below the national average for unauthorized immigrants as a percentage of the total state population. They comprise about 1.5% of all Minnesotans, compared with 4.1% nationally.
The brutal excesses of Trump’s mass deportation program ran up against its fiercest and most effective resistance here. Because most Minnesotans intuitively know these truths about the value of our immigrants, hundreds of thousands of us hit the streets and social media keyboards, rising in solidarity to condemn the illegalities and indecencies of the assault. Minnesota earned well-deserved national and international acclaim for turning the tide of public opinion against Trump’s anti-immigrant crusade, refreshing and vindicating our state’s exceptional progressive and humanitarian reputation.
The surge appears to be receding. But this assault on Minnesota’s basic character and egalitarian spirit, centered on immigrants of color in particular, was underway years before and will continue. The incessant refrain that Minnesota is a failed state, ruined by immigrants and by the liberal policies that attract and support them, will remain the primary point of conflict in the 2026 election campaign.
A preponderance of factual evidence and scores of 50-state rankings on every aspect of life in the United States repudiate the narrative of a failed state, or even one in decline. Minnesota continues to rank near the top or well above average and far ahead of other Midwestern and other red states, on almost every measure of socioeconomic condition.
Minnesota’s 100,000 to 130,000 undocumented residents account for only about 1% of an estimated 13 million in the U.S. Thus, during the height of Operation Metro Surge, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deployed more than 10% of its heavily armed and masked agents in pursuit of 1% of the nation’s undocumented immigrants. The more than 3,000 federal agents outnumbered all other law enforcement personnel in the 10 largest metro-area cities.
This article is the first in a series that analyzes and debunks the concerted effort by Trump and his various allied propagandists to defame the North Star State. We’ll start with the slander against immigrants, both authorized and undocumented, and we’ll draw largely from sources historically aligned with Republicans and the conservative movement, which claims to be the champion of free enterprise and liberty.
The economic case
The aforementioned Minnesota Chamber of Commerce’s February 2025 study was released one month after Trump was inaugurated with a renewed promise to deport all 13 million immigrants who lacked legal status. “The Economic Contributions of New Americans in Minnesota,” is chock-full of granular data about exactly how beneficial our foreign-born residents are for our mutual well-being. Previous reports on the same subject have highlighted the specific contributions provided by each group, including Somalis. These are some of the subheads, each backed up by charts, graphs and maps:
“Minnesota’s foreign-born population has among the highest labor force participation rates in the country, and participation rates continue to grow over time.”
“Minnesota’s foreign-born population is becoming more highly educated over time and is shifting toward higher skilled jobs.”
“International migration is driving population growth in Minnesota this decade.”
“Self-employment rates increased sharply this decade for Minnesota’s foreign-born population, closing the gap with the state’s native-born population.”
The report’s opening summary offers tacit acknowledgement of growing anti-immigrant fervor over the past decade. It doesn’t mention Trump by name but it clearly disputes his rancid claims that immigrants are unwelcome “invaders,” or “garbage” coming from “shithole countries” who are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Although routinely described as “illegal aliens” or “lawbreakers” by their detractors, about 40% of unauthorized residents occupy a gray area of semi-protected status. These include so-called “Dreamers” — adults who were children when brought in by undocumented parents — and refugees admitted under the temporary status that Trump is trying to revoke. Many report regularly to authorities. Moreover, unauthorized or illegal presence is not a serious crime and is primarily considered a civil offense.
“While the national discourse and policy debates have shifted considerably during this time, the economic realities remain unchanged,” the report says. “Immigration is an essential ingredient of Minnesota’s long-term economic success. New Americans contribute to the economy as entrepreneurs, consumers, taxpayers and workers, often filling high-demand roles that business struggles to staff.”
In many places, the report reads a bit like a Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) handbook, including its reference to “New Americans” rather than immigrants. The report’s to-do list urges employers to become more “culturally competent,” to translate workplace materials and employ bilingual supervisors, and to hire more employees through worker visa programs. All those kinds of efforts have been condemned by the current regime as “unAmerican” and “woke.” (The national Chamber of Commerce has filed a lawsuit against Trump for imposing a prohibitive $100,000 fee on H1-B visas for the most skilled foreign workers.)
The Minnesota Chamber report contains a tactfully worded warning about mass deportation, noting that although total immigration surged 26% between 2012 and 2022, the unauthorized number in Minnesota remained flat. “This suggests that concerns about border security and immigration enforcement should not be conflated with Minnesota’s longer-term immigration trends, which have provided a clear boost to the state’s economy.”
About 9% of Minnesotans are foreign born (naturalized citizens, documented residents and undocumented), compared with 15% nationally.
Given this earlier unequivocal endorsement of immigration by the state’s premier business association, the brief anodyne statement by more than 60 CEOs and business leaders in late January, after the second killing of a citizen observer, was inexcusably lame. Their statement politely raised alarms about economic damage and called for “immediate deescalation” between state and federal authorities. But it said nothing about the value or humanity of immigrants or abuses of ICE and was widely criticized as gutless.
The fraud-and-crime cover story
Undocumented immigrants nationally were incarcerated for serious crimes at half the rate of native-born citizens between 2010 and 2023 (613 per 100,000 for the former, compared with 1,221 per 100,00 for the latter). Legal immigrants are even more law-abiding, and about one-fourth as likely to be imprisoned for a serious crime (at 319 per 100,000.) There is no evidence that Minnesota’s immigrants differ appreciably.
This finding comes not from an immigrant rights group, but from an April 2025 report by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that generally aligns with conservative Republican policy positions, especially on taxes and regulation of business.
Common sense explains this. Both documented and undocumented non-citizens have more to lose from any behavior that brushes up against the law. They already risk deportation, loss of employment opportunities, and legal consequences that tear apart their families. They know this because deportation was proceeding at a brisk pace, without the storm trooper tactics and more focused on felons, under Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama.
The percentage of immigrants nationally who have college degrees is about the same as the general population. Since 2010, the percentage of foreign-born Minnesotans with four-year degrees has increased from 31% to 39%, moving closer to the overall state percentage of 51%.
Nevertheless, the falsehood of the immigrant as primarily a criminal invader has been the overarching message of Trump/MAGA xenophobia going back to Trump’s 2016 campaign launch, with his infamous portrayal of Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers.
Trump found a convenient pretext for scapegoating Minnesota, seizing on the pandemic scandals involving a few dozen Somali leaders who were stealing from federal school nutrition funds, a scam masterminded by a white suburban Burnsville woman. More fraud in autism, child care and chemical dependency programs has been discovered, and Minnesota is aggressively prosecuting and incarcerating offenders.
Inflated and wildly escalating estimates of $1 billion, then $9 billion and even $19 billion in fraud have been alleged by Trump’s appointed officials, with little itemization or documentation. The Minnesota Star Tribune and other reputable sources have challenged those numbers, noting that total fraud convictions over the past six years amounts to about $300 million.
Of the 10 counties in Minnesota with the highest percentage of foreign-born residents, six are outside the Twin Cities metropolitan area. The highest percentage (20.1%) are in Nobles County, an agribusiness processing center in the rural southwestern corner of the state.
Other national experts in recent months have said that Minnesota may not even be an outlier in total fraud and overpayment of federal programs, estimated by the General Accounting Office at a staggering $233 billion to $521 billion annually. Thefts of similar scale from pandemic and human service programs have been reported in Florida, Texas and Arizona.
Moreover, although Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security have been secretive about their arrests and operations, many or most of those arrested in ICE sweeps this winter do not have criminal histories, or are legal residents detained because of their appearance, accent or attitude. Far as we know, none or very few of those deported, Somali or otherwise, were new suspects alleged to be engaging in fraud. Diligent local reporting by news organizations has documented that some of the deportees had served their time long ago and were currently law-abiding.
Perhaps the most convincing response to the Trump cover story of fraud as pretext was penned by former U.S. Attorney Andy Luger in the Jan. 26 Star Tribune commentary section. Luger has been widely praised for spearheading successful post-pandemic crime and fraud fighting under President Joe Biden, with strong cooperation from state and local authorities. Under the headline “No one in Minnesota asked for this,” Luger wrote that “Constitutional and effective public safety bears no relation to what we are witnessing today.”
Minnesota had the 4th highest foreign-born labor force participation in the nation in 2023, with 74.6 % of immigrants working, compared with 67.3% of our native-born. This is partly due to the fact that the foreign-born population is younger, with 80% of working age (18-64).
Luger noted the massive resignations from the current Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney’s office by lawyers who could not abide orders to investigate the victims of ICE violence rather than the shooters, thus actually impeding further investigations of fraud. Luger said the Trump administration had “torn apart the once solid local-federal collaboration. Jettisoning the priorities that were built on a local consensus, the D.C. creators of Operation Metro Surge have sold a false narrative that Minnesota is suffering from a violent illegal immigrant crime wave. We are not.”
All about race and religion
In the 1910 Census, a period Trump often refers to as a golden era for America, Minnesota had a much higher percentage of foreign-born people, about one in four residents compared with one in 10 now. To a greater degree than any other state, these immigrants were Scandinavian, and many also came from Germany, and eastern and southern Europe. They quickly unionized, demanded better pay and working conditions and often were viewed as radical and dangerous socialists in a state that was already more liberal than most, owing to the earlier influence of New England abolitionists and social reformers. (See my “Reappraising Minnesota” MinnPost series, also recent commentary by the Star Tribune’s Jill Burcum, and by Saengmany Ratsabout in MinnPost and MNopedia).
These immigrants fed the Progressive movement in the early 1900s and then fueled the rise of Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party, the most successful left-wing party in American history. They fought for income taxes, universal human rights and greater economic security for working folks, and later, racial justice. They created an enduring communitarian and egalitarian spirit that gave Minnesota its unique political DNA. In many ways, we are to the United States what Nordic countries model for the rest of the world.
For each year from 1994 to 2023, the U.S. immigrant population generated more in taxes than it received in benefits from all levels of government. Over that period, immigrants created a cumulative fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion, including $3.9 trillion in savings on interest on the debt. Without immigrants, U.S. government public debt at all levels would be at least 205% of gross domestic product (GDP) — nearly twice its 2023 level.
As astute observers have pointed out, a key factor driving Trump’s “Reckoning and Retribution” is that Minnesota stands in even bolder relief than other blue states for everything MAGA does not. Trump campaigned here often and predicted victory but was rejected by voters all three times. The state hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1972, the longest stretch of any state. Gov. Tim Walz’s role as vice-presidential candidate in 2024, portraying Trump as “weird’’ and continuing harsh condemnation of his policies since then, added motivation.
In the 1920s and now, opponents of immigration objected not so much with economic arguments but with religious and ethnic bigotry. The earlier America First movement was led by the fundamentalist Protestant white majority in the South, already violent and militant in oppression of Black citizens, and spread quickly into Indiana and the Midwest.
The nationalistic opposition was variously anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, openly fascist, loaded with hostility for swarthier Italians and people from southern and eastern Europe. And it inspired a rebirth of the KKK during the 1920s, touching Minnesota as well. After World War I, the nation basically shut the door to immigration and imposed racist quotas that stayed in place until the 1960s civil rights movement, when race-based barriers to immigration finally came down. In contrast to a century ago, about 90% of immigrants today are people of color or are from Islamic countries, although by far the majority in the U.S. come from Catholic and Spanish-speaking nations in Latin America.
No reasonable observer can fail to see how racial and religious exclusion feeds the new deportation frenzy. MAGA’s leaders proudly proclaim it. Trump’s inner circle, Vice President J.D. Vance, top deputy Stephen Miller, and informal adviser Laura Loomer, have made it clear that MAGA doctrine rejects the idea that the United States is a nation founded on ideals of equality and democracy and civil liberty. White conservative Christian ethno-nationalism, blood and soil, has replaced the Statue of Liberty’s hospitable welcome to the “huddled masses” of the world. As Vance has said, “We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.”
National studies agree that foreign-born Americans are less likely to be incarcerated for serious crimes than the native-born population. Unauthorized immigrants are half as likely to be imprisoned for serious crimes, and legal immigrants are one-fourth as likely to be incarcerated.
Although the mass deportation is focused on those without the precise paperwork for residency, and Trump has backtracked at times when business leaders objected to the removal of highly skilled employees or farm workers, the overall message is crystal clear. Almost no foreigners, and especially not those of color and non-Christians, documented or otherwise, are truly welcome here anymore.
The best path forward
The obvious way forward nationally on immigration has been in front of us for decades, and it involves far more than ending mass deportation or curbing a few of the violent excesses and trampling of constitutional rights by ICE.
We came very close to a workable solution almost 20 years ago, with a proposal by none other than President George W. Bush, a born-again Christian and very conservative Republican. Bush and Republican leaders in the House and Senate got behind a comprehensive and orderly process granting legal status or faster pathways to citizenship for millions of undocumented workers who had proven to be long-time law-abiding citizens. Despite strong bipartisan approval and passage in the Senate, and polls showing popular support, nationalist extremists and forerunners of Trumpism in the House torpedoed the deal.
About half of foreign-born Minnesotans are already naturalized citizens. Citizenship rates run especially high among some of our largest newcomer groups that began immigrating decades ago, Somalis, Hmong and others from Africa and Asia.
A new national pathway to legal status looks to be impossible as long as Trump is in office and as long as MAGA controls Congress. Any new solution also will require acceptance by immigrant rights groups of much tighter controls on entry, also known as “order at the border,” a policy already underway in the final year of the Biden administration.
But Minnesotans in the meantime can push for state policies demanding due process, challenging ICE policies, and compensating our immigrants for the economic damage of Operation Metro Surge. In contrast to the earlier feeble statement by CEOs, there are new signs the Minnesota business community is finding a spine. At the annual Chamber of Commerce dinner held at the opening of the legislative session, President Doug Loon announced that national immigration “reform” (usually a codeword for easier pathways to legal status) would be a chamber priority. “Reform, simply put, is overdue, and a workable legal immigration system is desperately needed,” Loon said.
In 1910, Minnesota had one of the nation’s highest percentages of foreign-born residents, at 25%, compared with 9% now. Most were Scandinavians, Germans and eastern Europeans. They contended with native bias and discrimination and were often branded as communist agitators or slow-witted “squareheads” and other ethnic slurs.
Even more important, Minnesotans who are proud of our state and its distinctive progressive culture need to stand up and say so more aggressively, expanding this resistance to the full range of policies under attack. We are not known for tooting our own horn too loudly, like braggy Texans or brassy New Yorkers. We are more adept at a passive-aggressive kind of pride, and it’s time to dispense with the passive part.
Reporter Charles Homans, himself a former Minnesota resident, put it well in his recent New York Times Magazine piece headlined “Trump’s Fight With Minnesota Is About More Than Immigration.”
Immigrants comprise 15% of the U.S. population, but foreign-born scientists and inventors accounted for almost 25% of the market value of patents. Minnesota business leaders concur that immigrants here are indispensable contributors to our innovation economy, bioscience, medical technology and other high-tech sectors.
“(Minnesota] hospitality had historically been a point of pride for the state, a piece of the exceptionalism that Minnesotans, performatively modest as they are, have always claimed. It was a product of a broader, deep-rooted civic idealism: the state’s preponderance of religious charities, community-level nonprofit organizations and in particular its Nordic-style social safety net, among the most generous in the country.” Minnesota’s 2025-26 winter uprising, Homans concluded, is a recognition that people here “do still share a broad vision of what the civic ideal means to them.”
Or as Bruce Springsteen more poetically declared in his instant hit ballad, “The Streets of Minneapolis”: “We’ll take our stand for this land, and the stranger in our midst.”
Dane Smith is a retired St. Paul resident, a former government and politics reporter for the Minnesota Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and a former president of a progressive policy research and advocacy organization. He frequently writes commentary on state politics and is the author of MinnPost’s “Reappraising Minnesota” series, published in 2023-24.
Sources for immigration by the numbers: Minnesota Chamber of Commerce Foundation, Pew Research Center, Cato Institute, Minnesota State Demographic Center U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Bureau of Economic Research.
