NEWS: The Mark of Operation Metro Surge on Minnesota’s Workforce and Economy

Local officials, business leaders, and immigrant rights advocates centered their discussion at the House Workforce, Labor, and Economic Development Finance and Policy Committee meeting on February 19 around the immediate and long-term effects of Operation Metro Surge on Minnesota’s workforce and economy.

As a collective, Minnesota’s immigrant business owners and workers generate $41 billion in economic output each year in the state, according to a presentation by Jake Schwitzer, executive director of North Star Policy Action.

“If we assume even a modest 10 percent decline in economic output among just immigrants in the state, it would suggest a weekly reduction of nearly $80 million for the state’s economy,” Schwitzer said.

Preliminary findings from the City of Minneapolis suggest that the economic impact of Operation Metro Surge is at least $203.1 million as of the end of January, with losses of $47 million in wages each month.

While immigrant communities have been hit the hardest by the federal occupation by ICE, speakers emphasized that all Minnesotans — including those with legal status — have been impacted in some way or another.

Rep. Emma Greenman (DFL–Minneapolis)

“If you go out and you talk to people … what you’ll hear from small businesses … is that not only is their worker base impacted, their customer base is impacted,” said Rep. Emma Greenman (DFL–Minneapolis).

R.T. Rybak, president and CEO of the Minneapolis Foundation, described how his organization has partnered with the state to encourage individuals to shop at small stores which have seen lower sales, and reached out to large businesses about collecting donations to support their recovery.

“When big business gets a cold, small business gets pneumonia, and that’s especially true for the hospitality industry,” Rybak said, leading his organization to host the Salt Cure Fund, a fund aimed at providing relief for struggling restaurants.

Minneapolis Foundation senior vice president of impact, Jo-Anne Stately, added that the organization’s economic recovery fund, with grants ranging from $2,500 to $10,000, had seen over 1,000 applications from businesses in its first week.

The Latino Economic Development Center has dispersed emergency grants to struggling Latino businesses across Minnesota. Director of Operations Lill Bloise said that of the 385 applications that her organization reviewed, more than 65 percent of those businesses reported revenue losses over 50 percent.

Sarah Peterson, a local immigration attorney, described how several changes to immigration policy under the Trump administration — including a new $100,000 fee for certain H-1B work visas and the USCIS’s pause on processing legal paperwork — have posed significant challenges, especially for higher education and the health care industry.

Nicole Mattson, Care Providers of Minnesota

The long-term care sector faces particular pressure, given that approximately 30 percent of its workers are foreign-born, said Nicole Mattson, vice president of advocacy and workforce development for Care Providers of Minnesota.

Escalating ICE activity has struck fear across immigrant communities, prompting many to stay home out of concern for their safety and leaving hard-to-fill vacancies at their places of employment.

“When employees are afraid to drive to work, to take public transportation, or to attend required trainings, that creates real time staffing instability in facilities that already have no slack in their system,” she said. “Our workforce reality is fragile, so any additional external pressure is going to be felt.”

As local organizations, advocates, and policy makers continue to navigate the networks through which they can provide aid for impacted businesses and communities, Stately explains that recovery efforts will likely take much longer than one year. Looking ahead, she believes that collaboration is the best way to move forward, and that work must involve support from the state.

“We appreciate the role that we get to play, but we really need the government to be able to respond to this as well,” she said.

Updates

Sen. Zaynab Mohamed reported the following in her newsletter: “One developing cost is linked to several cancelled or relocated destination events that moved locations due to the atmosphere of violence and fear ICE caused. Another difficult-to-measure impact, according to Minneapolis’s Emergency Management Director, is that of mental health, which she called some of “the most invisible and most severe” costs of Operation Metro Surge. … The owner of a popular Brooklyn Park breakfast spot testified that his shop was unlikely to reopen after ICE took away one of his employees. Before Occupation Metro Surge, the owner had been planning to expand his business. Another restaurant owner that employs 300 people locally described sales losses of 50-90 percent in December, requiring him to take out four high-interest loans to meet payroll and other expenses.”