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[2:17] Hello and welcome to another episode of Access to Democracy. I'm your host, Steve Francisco. Thank you for joining us. Today. We have a return guest, Dane Smith, an author and journalist and frequent contributor to the online newspaper Minn Post, is with us today. Dane, welcome back to Access to Democracy.
[2:36] Thanks, Steve. Always a pleasure.
[2:38] You are becoming quite the regular on our program because you are a prolific journalist and looking into issues that are in the forefront of the news. And you have just now begun publishing a new series of articles about what you call generally the defamation of Minnesota. Tell us about this new series, what it's about?
[3:00] Well, sure. Um, in a nutshell, I think Minnesota has been subjected in recent years to an unprecedented assault on our reputation and character. Uh uh, unfair, uh, statistically invalid, uh, allegations having to do with our, our basic, uh, condition here in Minnesota. We've over the years. You know, it's always the party out of power, always tries to paint a picture of, um, decline or or a need for a change. But this is really over the top. And we've seen it from documentaries like The Fall of Minneapolis, which tried to vindicate Derek Chauvin and tried to tried to paint, uh, Minneapolis as a dystopian hellhole. Um, then there was a precarious state. It was another documentary called that tried to make the case that Minnesota was in deep decline and and as well as Minneapolis.
[4:02] So this sounds like a running narrative really propagated by the MAGA movement.
[4:07] And it's coming mostly from the hard right MAGA conservative base center of the American experiment Alpha News. Social media just amplifies it. And pounds and pounds and pounds it. But it's also come from some what I would call dissatisfied centrists with some credible or, you know, some credible case can be made that we've we need to do better on crime and some education statistics and so forth. Um, so the the attack is usually lodged against, um, Democrats. Democrats are blamed for this alleged, uh, dystopia. Uh, and the Minneapolis City Council members who are Democrats but are also democratic socialists, get particularly blamed for everything that's gone wrong. So I thought it was just high time that we really look at where Minnesota is compared to other states. A lot of times they'll point to a to a problem like crime or education or economic, you know, signs of slower economic growth as if it's unique. And in fact, you look around and you see how Minnesota is actually comparing to other states on these things. And lo and behold, we still rank very high, well above average on most of the key indicators of socioeconomic condition as well as business, health and vitality.
[5:34] And we're going to delve into those in some more detail. But I want to ask you first, as we get further into this discussion, Dane, why do you think this is happening? Let's accept your proposition that Minnesota, you call it the defamation of Minnesota. You've talked about who's doing it, but what is the motivation? Is it just purely political? I think are there other aspects to it, and do you think these arguments resonate with the public?
[6:01] I think that it is more purely political. I mean, if you really look at where it's coming from, uh, it is designed to flip Minnesota, to make it red, to make it a red state.
[6:13] Because the state has them voted, for example, for a Republican presidential candidate since Nixon in 1970.
[6:19] But in recent years, it's been close enough to where we have become a target. And, um, Trump in particular has it in for Minnesota. He doesn't like the fact that Walz ran against him and and criticized him so strongly and effectively. I actually thought in the last campaign. But but he's really got it in for Minnesota. And this provoked all this narrative, helped build a case for the surge operation Metro surge sending in 3000 agents, uh, you know, 10%, 10% of the Ice police force against 1% of our of the unauthorized immigrants. That's how many we have in Minnesota. 1% of the national unauthorized immigrants. Since 10% of the police in here. And of course, that's been the story for this whole winter, the way Minnesotans rose up, um, admirably, courageously and and basically sent them out of town or sent them packing because and of course, the murder of Renee and Alex had a lot to do with that. That's been the story. So, you know, when I started this series, I had no idea that it would be so timely. But now it really is. People are really focused on Minnesota nationally and internationally and in a better way.
[7:36] Now let's look at a couple of particular aspects of this. These charges against Minnesota and suggesting that our state is failing. Um, you argue in the piece, actually, that this defamation of Minnesota began prior to Operation Surge, which actually began in December of last year and has kind of started to wind down now as they moved agents out. Um, uh, what particular things did you see occurring before Operation Surge, which was obviously directed? The administration said Minnesota is being overrun by criminal immigrants who were here illegally. There were attacks against our Somali American community. Particularly memorable, the president of the United States referring to Somali people in Minnesota as garbage. A literal word that the president used to describe American citizens. Right. Um, tell us a little bit more about what was happening before Operation Surge.
[8:37] Well, I alluded to this earlier, but, um, the after the protests against George Floyd and actually those protests, again, we were the center of the kind of the center of attention because.
[8:51] For the world. Yeah, for the world.
[8:53] Because Because what happened to George Floyd and our vigorous protests against it actually fueled a, uh. An examination of racial injustice in the in the country, in the world and, and also especially of policing. And since then, a lot of good things have happened to police and police policing reform. So, so that's the, the, the father, uh, the deeper background, you know, so it goes about back to it really started intensifying about six years ago. Um, and of course, the protests had boiled over into arson and vandalism. And that was that was just a big mess. Uh, it gave it kind of a cover, sort of a sort of some credibility to say.
[9:41] Wasn't there a suggestion to by the critics? The president and his supporters suggested that the protesters on the streets were being paid, but there's no evidence of that. I mean, they.
[9:53] Were.
[9:54] Using other people's names like George Soros and other people, suggesting that they were writing cheques to pay people. And we've seen that argument recently, again, with the No Kings protests arguing that people were being paid to be out there.
[10:07] There's also very little evidence that the people who are doing the the vandalism and the arson were serious protestors at all.
[10:17] Well, what we learned.
[10:18] Was just opportunists.
[10:19] Didn't we learn that that a significant number of them weren't from Minnesota at all? They were coming up here from Chicago and other places, other parts of the country.
[10:28] They were not. They tended not to be Black Lives Matter activists. They tended to be just criminals. And some of them, many of them white boys from the suburbs. Yeah. So regardless, there's always been a critique, especially from the business community in Minnesota, that Minnesota is bad for business because we our taxes are higher. We have more generous public programs. We spend more on education. We invest more in education. We invest more in human services. So this is this goes way back. For more than a century, the business community in America has been unhappy with the New Deal and labor movements, and anything that is done to spread the earnings from industrialism to a broader set of people, they want to maximize profits. This is this is really an old story, but it really did intensify in the last few years. And it sort of so so you have the criticism coming in that it's a failed state because it's it's bad for business. It's being laced into this, uh, Minnesota being a bad state because we have too many immigrants and we have too much fraud. Another thing which has been grossly exaggerated.
[11:50] Let's take those one by one. I want to talk about those in a little more detail. This idea that Minnesota is being overrun by illegal or undocumented people coming into Minnesota, what's the reality about that? You talked about this in your article during Operation Metro Surge. Tell us a little bit more what you found.
[12:11] The facts are that Minnesota has only about one point. Only about 1.5% of our population are unauthorized immigrants. That's compared to 4.5% nationally. So to start with, we have fewer unauthorized immigrants as a percentage of our population even than the United States. Um, we have about 100 to 130,000, um, that they say altogether that amounts to about 1% of all the unauthorized immigrants. Metro surge sent 10% of its police force after 1% of the on our.
[12:45] They had a higher number of Ice agents here than the combined size of the Minneapolis Saint.
[12:51] The five largest police departments had fewer officers than Ice did on the streets during the peak of the surge. I thought an interesting thing that I pointed out in this first installment, too, that I is actually well known, is that when we say illegal aliens and then they often hear the term lawbreakers, the actual crime of being here without the right paperwork is a is a misdemeanor. It's it's a little more serious than jaywalking, right? But it's not what most of us consider a crime. Yeah, you're not stealing anything and you're not hurting anyone. In fact, they're contributing to our economy enormously. And that's a whole thrust of my story. But. But the other thing is that of all the unauthorized immigrants, about 40 are actually in a great about 40% are in a gray area where they're trying to be legal. Maybe their visas have lapsed. Uh, maybe they're they're in a they're in some.
[13:47] Or they came in the refugees temporary protected status, refugee status.
[13:52] And then it got revoked. And now they're trying to get it back. So it's not like there's a bunch of people hiding in the shadows. Well, waiting to do damage to to Minnesotans.
[14:02] The administration has been saying for a long time, Dane, that we want people to follow the legal process to be in the United States legally. Yet when they are doing that, we saw during Operation Surge and even before Ice agents detaining people as they were at their immigration hearings are coming out of them, right. So if you want people to abide by the law, and you're actually going to inhibit them from attending their own immigration hearings, that's pretty remarkable.
[14:30] Yeah. I also wanted to offer some real long term perspective a century ago or more. Minnesota was one of the actually was one of those states that had the most immigrants.
[14:42] As a percentage.
[14:43] As a percentage of the.
[14:44] Population.
[14:45] We were much more Immigrant than most states. Way back around 1910. This is when my wife's ancestors came from Sweden, and there were waves and waves of people, and there was resentment of them too. And it eventually led to a a cutoff in immigration and a very racial, racially bigoted policy that said, we would only accept white people from Europe. But there was always this resentment in this country. We we love to think of ourselves as a Statue of Liberty and bring us to the huddled masses. And please come here. And if you work hard, you can succeed. In fact, there has always been this bigotry and resentment of foreigners. It's called xenophobia. It's been part of America from the, from the beginning. And and we're just seeing a real nasty, ugly recurrence of it right now.
[15:38] Right. Um, let's talk about for a moment there are a couple of interesting studies about the economics of what immigrants bring to our community. There's really what you would call the mythology about immigrants are just taking they're not contributing to the community. But you came across in your research, you came across two studies, one by the Chamber of Commerce, one by the Cato Institute. Talk about those for a moment. What did they find about the economic contributions of immigrants to our community?
[16:10] Okay. Well, the chamber now is the largest business organization in Minnesota. It's basically almost every business in Minnesota, small and large, intermediate.
[16:20] And it tends to lean Republican. It tends to weaken politically.
[16:24] In fact, they tend to be part of the defamation chorus. They tend to be the people who say, oh, we're being taxed too much and we can't afford this level of schooling or this level of public education or, or food stamps or, you know, they have been a force for fiscal conservatism. And they they typically have been the, the, the voice that says we're headed in the wrong direction now. But on the other hand, the chamber for years, for more than a decade, has issued reports every other year about the value of immigrants to our economy, how that's the major source of our population growth. Um, and then on and on and on. I would like to read just one paragraph. Please do. From from the piece. I point out that under constant siege, even before the federal invasion, the immigrants, according to the to the chamber's reports, have been providing almost all our population increase and much of our economic growth, paying more in taxes than they receive in government benefits, outperforming native born whites and labor force participation. In other words, more likely to want to work than the native population toiling and physically demanding jobs that native white Minnesotans aren't taking. Roofing our houses, milking our cows, nursing our elderly. That's where the real preponderance of immigrants are actually thus sustaining our key pillars in our economy, which is agribusiness, health care, construction, manufacturing and service industries. All of these are heavily populated, are the workforce is immigrants or a larger percentage. There are also, though surprisingly well-educated, immigrants are. Many of them are registering patents. Somebody recently showed me a wall of patents. I think it was at Medtronic, and more than half the names were immigrant names.
[18:22] They're interviewing Somali Latino immigrants, people from all over the world, I would say.
[18:27] Right. Especially India, and some from China and Asia in particular, have been very successful in science and technology. Um, I would not leave this out. They're not only becoming more educated and assimilated with each generation, but they're enriching our our arts and cultural scene. The food here in Minnesota is so much better than it was 50 years ago that they're broadening our minds, they're strengthening our connections to the rest of the world. It's just when, when when when when when when. Right. That's the story of immigration.
[19:04] And that growth, uh, distinguishes Minnesota really from our surrounding states, doesn't it? That Minnesota has actually been a magnet. We've seen the population in the Dakotas, I believe, has fallen. The census data would show that.
[19:21] The oil boom is over.
[19:22] That's why the oil boom in North Dakota is over. South Dakota is not drawing as many. It's drawing some. You know, you get some people going there. But for the most part, there's been a net outmigration from those states. And Minnesota has benefited from people coming from surrounding states for job opportunities, which you would argue, I think that some of these job opportunities are actually being created by our immigrant communities?
[19:46] Absolutely. Yeah. That Minnesota's for. I think for the last 20 or 30 years. Maybe going farther back has year in and year out. Had a higher population growth than almost than every other Midwestern state. Mhm. Um, and this is in the context of general flight from the northeastern part of the country and the Midwest to the South and the West. So we have been affected less by that than other Midwestern states. And the Twin Cities metro region, similarly has has been healthier on most population growth and most measures than other metro areas. Detroit.
[20:39] No, not at all. Um, you know, the so victim just broke ground, I think, here in Eagan on a $200 million expansion. All you have to do is look at the trade journals of the various economic sectors and business associations in this country. And there's just they're just replete with good, you know, positive stories about new expansions of business, businesses moving in, uh, you know, sales up, uh, and, and we are actually a center for health care. We remain, by many measures, probably the first or second ranked, highest ranked state. And when it comes to all matters.
[21:25] Health, we just saw in the business news just this week that once again, the Mayo Clinic was listed as the number one private employer in the state of Minnesota. I think it was over 50 some thousand employees who work for the Mayo Clinic. Many of them are recent immigrants to.
[21:41] Yeah. Well the in the The precarious state documentary one of the one of. They found an economist to assert that Minnesota doesn't lead the nation in anything anymore. And and they point back to 50 years ago when we were out front on some computer and digital revolution and controlled data and so forth through them. And it's just not true. I mean, it's we are leaders and all kinds of industries. And and I'm going to preview my second installment, which would be out in a couple of weeks. Um, I talk about how the, um, I actually name the sectors where we were leaders, uh, water treatment, um, agriculture innovation. Um, you know, there's a California company just moved here because we're way out front in clean energy and and clean agriculture. Uh, it's just it goes are small business or small manufacturing sector has always been extremely strong in this state. These are little nimble companies in Alexandria and Thief River falls. You know we have Arctic Cat up there. We have we have digit digit key up there all over the state. We have thriving communities where the business is booming. Business is doing well. They love Minnesota because we have educated people, we have healthy workers, and the socio economic conditions are off the charts, right? We were number three. We were number three, uh, at least poverty. Um, and we're also number three. And things that states do to reduce poverty. So like if we were number one and putting money in human services and health care and we were dead last in poverty, you'd have reason to question. But it pays off what we do in human services, what we do with our generosity, and in lifting people up, giving, uh, helping them be all that they can be. In other words, yeah, actually pays off economically. It is the way to go. And nations and states that do this have better economies and better socio economic indicators than states and nations that don't.
[23:54] And the states that are not doing that in the US right now tend to be red states, right? Where the philosophy is low taxation, low support for public education, low support for public services, low support for health care.
[24:09] Right.
[24:09] And you're seeing this happening in other parts of the country. There was another study, too. I wanted to touch on the Cato Institute, which is really aligned as sort of a libertarian organization, if you will. They looked at the economy, too, and they were noting that the percentage of immigrants nationally who have college degrees about the same as the general population since 2010, the percentage of foreign born Minnesotans with four year degrees has actually increased 31% to 39%, which moves us closer closer to the overall state percentage, which is about 51%. That's pretty remarkable number when we compare it to other states, isn't it?
[24:52] We have the highest graduation rate in the country. High school graduation. We have the highest percentage, or we're either in the top 1 to 5 in percentage of our population that has at least a high school education. Yeah. We're also pretty high in college attainment. And in general, we have a we we're in a better position than other states when it comes to education.
[25:18] So I want to ask you, Dean attainment. There was much in the news at the height of Operation Surge. There were many people demanding that the Minnesota business community be much more outspoken in opposition to the attacks on the immigrant community that were occurring in Minnesota, not just in Minneapolis. In Saint Paul, this was happening in communities all over the state Worthington, Austin, Mankato, Rochester, etc. so they came out with a letter, which I believe it was about 60 of our businesses signed on to that was put together. But many people, yourself included, were critical of this thought. They should have gone further. And my question for you is if the immigrant community is making all of these contributions to our state's economy and to our businesses, why wouldn't those businesses have been more outspoken in support of the immigrant community? What are your thoughts about that?
[26:16] Well, that's a that's a fantastic question. And I can't answer it because I'm not leading the business community, but I.
[26:24] Is they're just trying to have it both ways or trying. Yes, I think I.
[26:27] Think they were trying trying to just be careful. And they ended up being too careful. And they were roundly and properly criticized for being too, uh, for just being a milquetoast, weak statement. However, since then at the chamber dinner, um, this year, which they always have as this session begins, the president of the chamber, Doug Lunn, actually said that the chamber will now take a position fighting for immigration reform. And when you say those words immigration reform, that is code for finding a pathway to citizenship for the millions and millions of American unauthorized immigrants who are productive members of our economy.
[27:13] Paying taxes.
[27:14] Paying taxes, been here for years, good people, and getting them the citizenship they deserve. Now, we almost got there 20 years ago with George W Bush, another Republican business conservative Christian Republican who actually pushed for this kind of policy. Um, and so I think there's hope in the horizon. There's so much general agreement that we have to. We have to move in this direction. And Minnesota's going to be a leader in that. Or at least it sounds like our business community is now on the record saying they're going to push for a path to citizenship, which is a directly at odds with Stephen Miller and Bannon and Trump on this idea of mass deportation of all 13 million people who don't have exactly the right paperwork to live in this country.
[28:03] It's not really. It's really been revealed as not a workable solution to our immigration problem, is it?
[28:09] No. Absolutely not. But beyond that, what's really frightening is there are voices, including Bovino, who lost his job because of the way Minnesotans, uh, stood up to him. And of course, Kristi Noem did, too. Yeah, there are voices here that are actually calling now for the removal of 100 million of Americans. This you can find this. It's the New York Times recently interviewed him. There's these bloggers and this these fringe characters on the right that are deeply influential in the Trump administration, who are saying we need to get rid of 100 million people and they're talking about all people. I mean, pretty much going after people of color en masse. And that is what's behind this immigrant, um, this, this fear of immigrants and the hatred of immigrants. It is about race and it's about religion and white Christian nationalism. It's, uh, it's a disease. It's infecting this country right now. I think people are rising up to it. I can't believe that this is where America really is. We're not. We're not a nation. You know, we're a nation that was founded on some glorious principles equality, freedom, civil liberties, freedom of the press, freedom, religion.
[29:29] An idea, really, rather than nationality or race or ethnicity, that anybody if you adopt the American ideals and support the Constitution. You can become an American.
[29:41] The Constitution? Neither the Constitution nor the declaration. Say a word about Christianity or about race. And it's that's the glory of America, really is these ideals. And JD Vance is out there saying that that's not what we are. It primarily, he's saying we're a particular people in a particular place.
[30:01] Dane Smith, we are going to have you back on Access to Democracy soon to continue this very fascinating discussion about our changing demographics and immigration issues. Dane Smith, thank you for joining us on Access to Democracy.
[30:16] Thank you. Thank you Steve.