There is no subject in American politics where people are more confident and less numerate. So let's do this one the way we've done the rest of the series: with the data, the dollar figures, and the parts that are inconvenient for everybody.
I'm going to end somewhere you may not expect — with fraud. Because the story I know best from twenty years of consumer-protection work is not the one either party tells, and it starts with a $4.5 million judgment.
The workforce arithmetic
Per the American Immigration Council's analysis of Census data for 2023, Minnesota is home to 482,367 immigrants — 8.4 percent of the population. But they make up 10.8 percent of the labor force: 339,138 workers.
That gap between 8.4 and 10.8 isn't an accident of ambition. It's demography. 82.9 percent of Minnesota's foreign-born residents are between 16 and 64 — prime working age — against 60.5 percent of the native-born. Only 10.6 percent are 65 or older, versus 18.5 percent of U.S.-born Minnesotans. And their participation is rising: Minnesota Compass finds 77 percent of foreign-born Minnesotans are working, up from 70 percent a decade ago.
Where do they work? Transportation and warehousing (16.1 percent of that workforce), manufacturing including food processing (15.7), professional and administrative services (12.1), health care and social assistance (11.7). They are 14.5 percent of Minnesota's STEM workers and 24.1 percent of the state's health aides — the people who bathe, feed, and lift somebody's parent.
The fiscal side: $6.16 billion in taxes paid in one year — $3.88 billion federal, $2.28 billion state and local — including $2.33 billion into Social Security and $583 million into Medicare, programs that a population which is 89 percent under 65 mostly funds rather than draws. Spending power: $16.96 billion. And 28,024 immigrant entrepreneurs — 9.9 percent of all Minnesota entrepreneurs, again above their population share — producing $667 million in business income.
One inconvenient number, in the other direction: the underemployment rate for foreign-born Minnesotans is 31.1 percent versus 28.0 percent for the native-born. That is a credential-recognition failure — engineers driving, nurses aiding — and it is money Minnesota is leaving on the table.
Why this is a workforce story, not an ideology story
Recall the demographic squeeze documented earlier in this series: a labor force projected to add only about 43,000 workers this entire decade, record numbers of workers over 65, and roughly 120,000 job vacancies with health care the largest single share.
Now put the Census Bureau's own population estimates beside it. Minnesota's net international migration fell from +33,360 in fiscal 2024 to +12,486 in fiscal 2025 — a drop of nearly two-thirds in one year, amid federal policy changes. (Census "years" run July to June.) In the same period the state's net domestic migration finally turned positive, at +8,300 — genuinely good news. But the arithmetic is unforgiving: the inflow that had been carrying Minnesota's labor-force growth shrank by about 21,000 people in a single year, and domestic migration replaced roughly a third of it.
You can hold any view you like about immigration policy. Minnesota's nursing homes cannot hold a view. LeadingAge Minnesota — the state's aging-services association, not an advocacy group — reported in August that its members are "increasingly reporting situations in which employees with pending Employment Authorization Document renewal applications are approaching—or experiencing—gaps in employment authorization." Translated: paperwork delays are pulling caregivers off Minnesota floors right now, in a sector that was already short-staffed enough that nursing-home workers threatened to strike over ratios in 2025.
What disruption costs, in dollars
Between December 2025 and 2026, federal immigration enforcement ran "Operation Metro Surge" in the Twin Cities. Set aside every argument about the policy and look only at what local institutions measured, as reported by Sahan Journal:
- The Lake Street Council estimated more than 1,000 businesses affected, with a collective revenue drop exceeding $30 million a month.
- A Hennepin County survey found an average revenue loss of $57,000 per business, with 66 percent of respondents reporting declines of 30 to 50 percent.
- $152 million in lost wages for Minneapolis workers.
- At Karmel Mall — roughly 650 businesses — 60 to 80 percent were closed at the peak; about a quarter were still shuttered in late August 2026, against $1.5 million in unpaid rent.
- Colonial Market, an immigrant-owned grocery chain, closed its Lake Street store in June after more than twenty people were arrested by agents in its parking lot; 23 employees worked there and half were laid off. Its owner: "In my south location, the one that closed, immigration was taking people literally out of my parking lot."
- Minneapolis schools recorded a drop of more than 1,700 students against a typical baseline of about 80.
Those are not projections. They are receipts from a corridor that rebuilt itself after 2020 and got knocked down again. The Legislature declined a $100 million relief request; Minneapolis approved $7 million. A cafe owner's assessment of the aid actually reaching her: "Twenty-five dollars is nothing. We need $25,000."
The part nobody covers: these are the most defrauded consumers in Minnesota
Here is where my day job gives me something to add. In consumer-protection law there is a category called affinity fraud — the con that works because of trust, community, language, and faith. Minnesota's immigrant communities absorb an enormous share of it, and it is almost never framed as what it is: a consumer-protection failure.
Nolosha Development. A developer marketed a walkable Lakeville community to East African families — homes, a mosque, a school, restaurants — and collected deposits of up to $25,000 a home, plus $500 just for a spot on a waiting list. At least 160 prospective homeowners, primarily Somali, lost money. The Attorney General's office sued in October 2024, and in late December 2025 a Hennepin County judge ordered $4.5 million in restitution plus $339,500 in costs. That is the system working — slowly, four years after the deposits started.
The tutoring scheme. Eighteen Somali mothers, all earning under $35,000 a year, say they were signed up for tutoring they believed was free and were instead charged $2,000 to $10,000 each through their state tax refunds, using Minnesota's own K-12 Education Credit Assignment Program. One mother: "Everything I was planning was destroyed." Read that again — the mechanism was a state program. When our own machinery becomes the delivery vehicle for a bad deal, that is not an immigration problem. That is an oversight problem, and it belongs to us.
Visa-service allegations. Sahan Journal reported that five women accused a Woodbury company of taking $650 to $2,700 each — one client, $10,000 to $15,000 — over years for tourist visas that never materialized. The Attorney General's office opened an investigation in 2025; no charges had been filed as of that reporting, and the company's CEO denied wrongdoing, saying, "I have nothing to hide." Allegations, properly labeled. But note the reported quote from one client about why she was targeted: "She knew about our status here." That is the whole business model of this kind of fraud — the mark cannot go to the police.
And Feeding Our Future. Let me be careful and exact, because this is where Minnesota's discourse goes off the rails. The stolen $250 million was federal child-nutrition money. The intended beneficiaries were underprivileged children — many of them in the very communities the case is now used as shorthand for. Seventy people were charged and the executive director of the organization at the center of it, who is not Somali, was convicted on all seven counts and sentenced to more than 41 years. A fraud committed by some people through institutions serving a community is not a fraud committed by that community, and any politician who blurs that line is telling you something about themselves, not about Minnesota.
Minnesota already has the law. It just doesn't use it enough.
Here is the fact I'd put in front of every prosecutor in this state. Minnesota has had a notario-fraud statute since 1996 — Minn. Stat. § 325E.031 — and it is a good one. Anyone offering immigration assistance must post signs, in English and in every language they do business in, stating "I AM NOT AN ATTORNEY LICENSED TO PRACTICE LAW." They may not call themselves a "notary public" or "immigration consultant" in any language. They must give a written contract in the customer's own language, itemized, with a 72-hour right to cancel. They may not keep a client's documents in a fee dispute.
And the remedy provision is the part that matters: a violation is a misdemeanor, and the penalties of Minn. Stat. § 8.31 apply — including a private cause of action. That means the Attorney General can sue, and so can the victim.
A thirty-year-old law with teeth, aimed precisely at the predators who work these communities. The question worth asking every candidate for every prosecutorial office in Minnesota is simple: when did your office last use it?
What we can do
Enforce § 325E.031 like it exists. Fund it, publicize it in the languages it was written for, and bring cases. Every notario shut down is dozens of families who keep their savings.
Fix the state programs that became fraud vectors. The education-credit episode is an internal-controls failure of exactly the kind this series has documented across Minnesota government. The lesson generalizes: a program without integrity controls doesn't just lose money, it lands hardest on the people with the least margin.
Recognize credentials. A 31 percent underemployment rate among foreign-born workers, in a state short of nurses and engineers, is a self-inflicted wound. Faster credential evaluation and bridge programs are cheap, and other states have run them.
And separate the questions. Border policy is a federal argument, and Minnesotans will land where they land. But whether a Minnesota grandmother gets a home health aide, whether a Lake Street business survives, and whether a Somali mother gets her $6,000 back from a swindler — those are Minnesota questions with Minnesota answers, and we ought to be able to get them right regardless of where anyone stands on the first one.
Immigrant Minnesotans pay $6.2 billion in taxes and hold up the industries that hold up the rest of us. The least this state owes them is the same protection from fraud that every other consumer gets. Right now, they get less. That's fixable — and fixing it is the job I've spent my career doing.
Sources
American Immigration Council, Map the Impact — Minnesota profile (dataset retrieved Sept. 1, 2026; data year 2023): population and labor-force shares, age structure, industry concentrations, STEM and health-aide shares, tax contributions, spending power, entrepreneurship, underemployment. Minnesota Compass (immigration topic page): labor-force participation trend and foreign-born share. U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 State Population Estimates (NST-EST2025-ALLDATA, components of change — international migration of +33,360 in FY2024 and +12,486 in FY2025; net domestic migration +8,300), retrieved and computed directly for this series. Workforce context from earlier articles in this series: MN DEED Job Vacancy Survey and Minnesota Chamber Foundation projections. LeadingAge Minnesota news item on Employment Authorization Document renewal gaps (Aug. 27, 2026) and its New Americans workforce resource page. Sahan Journal reporting on Operation Metro Surge economics: Atra Mohamed and Manali Shah (June 30, 2026 — Lake Street Council and Hennepin County survey figures, Karmel Mall), Viktorie Spurná (June 26, 2026 — Colonial Market closure, $152 million in lost wages), Ella Stern (Aug. 27, 2026 — Karmel Mall recovery, relief funding, quoted business owners), and Alfonzo Galvan (Feb. 12, 2025 — Lake Street corridor; Mar. 14, 2025 — nursing-home staffing and wages). Nolosha Development: Sahan Journal, Joey Peters (Jan. 12, 2026) on the $4.5 million restitution order and the Attorney General's October 2024 suit. K-12 Education Credit Assignment tutoring accounts: Sahan Journal, Joey Peters (Nov. 18, 2024, updated May 29, 2025). Visa-services allegations: Sahan Journal, Joey Peters (Sept. 30, 2025), including the subject's denial; allegations only, no charges filed as of that reporting. Feeding Our Future: Sahan Journal, Joey Peters (Oct. 19, 2023; Mar. 19, 2025) on the program defrauded and its intended beneficiaries, and U.S. Department of Justice releases on charges, convictions, and the May 2026 sentencing. Minn. Stat. § 325E.031 (Immigration Services) and Minn. Stat. § 8.31, verified verbatim at revisor.mn.gov.
Contested or unproven matters are labeled as allegations with the response of the accused. Claims about community stigma that could not be sourced to a named study or source were omitted. Corrections: campaign@madgettformn.com.