We talked with Andi Egbert about working on the new immigration section on Compass. Get Andi's take on why it was exciting to expand the immigration data, what surprised her, and what Compass has that you can't find anywhere else. We hope you will use Andi's suggestions as an impetus to delve deeper into this rich topic.

My husband and I lived in our home for nearly a year before we met the elderly couple whose house was within whistling distance from ours. Because we never rang the doorbell, and they never emerged outside, we could only speculate: Who were they, what were their challenges, what were they like?

There is uneasy sense that comes from not knowing your neighbors – a gnawing feeling of your shortcoming of civic and personal duty.

That’s why I’m so excited about the launch of the Immigration section on Minnesota Compass. Figuratively, it opens new doors on the lives of neighbors many of us know little about. Assembling this section taught me perhaps more than any other topic we’ve prepared for Compass:

  • About 100 years back in time, you can see the incredible imprint of immigration from Norway, Germany and Sweden on our state, and how this compares to smaller, recent spikes in Mexican, Hmong, and Vietnamese immigrants.
  • While the immigrant population in Minnesota has grown dramatically in the past 30 years, it was rebounding from a drop in immigration during the second half of the 1900s. The percent of Minnesota’s population that was foreign born in 2008 is less than the percent in 1950 (7 versus 8 percent, respectively).
  • Outside the Twin Cities, the Central, Southern, and Southwest regions are home to the greatest numbers of foreign born residents.   
  • Across most immigrant groups in Minnesota, both men and women are highly likely to be working. Perhaps not surprisingly, as immigrants live in the U.S. longer, they participate in the workforce in greater numbers. In addition, immigrants and their children comprise a growing share of our future workforce.
  • Our youngest residents are incredibly diverse. Minnesota is home to more than 205,000 children of immigrants (either foreign born, or native born with at least one foreign born parent), age 0-19. About  1 in 7 children is an immigrant child. Among infants to 4-year-olds in Minnesota, 1 in every 5 is an immigrant child.

In addition, we created profiles with some of the most requested data for seven of the largest immigrant groups in Minnesota (excluding Canadians), including Ethiopian, Hmong, Indian, Liberian, Mexican, Somali, and Vietnamese. While titled Groups At a Glance, I have a feeling many Minnesotans are going to spend more time than that with these tables, because we are proud to say they contain data about Minnesota’s foreign born residents that is available nowhere else. Beyond these larger groups, you can also see the incredible range of people that immigration’s tide has transported to Minnesota, from countries such as Bosnia and Belarus to Cameroon and Costa Rica.

Research validates that strong social ties can create positive health, social and even economic outcomes for communities. These ties begin with a hello, and they are strengthened through increasing levels of awareness, understanding, and in the best scenarios, a sense of common purpose that crosses boundaries of age, culture and ethnicity. For me, that phenomenon began when I finally met my neighbors Bob and Lucy, and we swapped ideas about how best to vanquish our dandelions.

We hope this Immigration section helps you learn more about your neighbors and continue the important work of building the social ties in communities across our diverse state.  At a minimum, we hope you’ll have the courage to “ring the doorbell.” 

Andi is a research associate on the Minnesota Compass project. She holds a Master of Public Policy degree from the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.