Today “Minnesota is home to about 480,000 foreign-born residents, comprising about 8.5% of the population, according to the state Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED). Those residents tend to be younger than Minnesota’s native-born population, and most are in their prime working years, filling jobs from agriculture to education to health care. Between 2011 and 2021, immigrants comprised half the state’s labor force growth, though they made up less than 11% of the workforce.” This includes an estimated 81,000 undocumented residents, 53,000 of whom are civilian workers age 16 or older.[1]
Yet “Minnesota’s [current] unemployment rate is lower than the U.S. as a whole, and employers are struggling to fill nearly 200,000 open jobs. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Minnesota’s labor shortage is among the country’s more severe, with just 51 workers for every 100 open jobs.”
Minnesota’s need for more workers is especially important in agriculture and health care.
- The State has rich farmland and relies upon immigrant workforces to tend to livestock or process animals. Many farms hire guest workers through the H-2A visa program, but efforts to increase the number of such visas and to make them available to dairy farm workers have been unsuccessful.
- Health care’s need for workers has been increasing with :a wave of baby boomer retirements and increasing numbers of older residents needing such care. And foreign-born health-care workers bring an outside perspective that has been shown to improve patient outcomes.
According to Minnesota’s State Demographer Susan Brower, “People don’t understand sometimes that there is no other option for growing the workforce other than international immigration or a change in domestic migration patterns, which for 20 years have not worked in the favor of Minnesota. We’d have to see, really, a very drastic change both in domestic migration patterns but also in the level of international immigration to even begin to scratch the surface of meeting the current labor force needs that we have.”
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[1] Nelson & Vondracek, A promised immigration crackdown if Trump wins re-election could cripple Minnesota workforce, StarTribune (May 2, 2024), This blog has published many posts about the low U.S. fertility rate and the overall U.S. need for more immigration and reforms of our immigration laws. (E.g., U.S. Fertility Rate Falls to Record Low (April 25, 2024) (and prior posts cited in note 2 thereto); More Thoughts on U.S. Low Fertility Rate (May 1, 2024).