Yesterday, in a column titled “The Great Wrecking of Minnesota still underway, 10 months later,” the Star Tribune’s Evan Ramstad, wrote of the economic impact of Operation Metro Surge:
Most significantly, it drove people out of a state that was barely growing.
The people who left, who largely were Hispanic immigrants, also contributed most to the little population growth Minnesota has experienced in recent years. Their exit has shrunk the labor force, the consumer base and number of people who pay taxes and generate economic growth.
We won’t see population data for 2026 until late next spring, but the effects of the exodus are already visible in Minnesota’s employment data, which comes out every month.
In September, Minnesota had 64,000 fewer people working than it did in November last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s a 2.1% drop in a workforce of 3 million.
And we know those people didn’t just become unemployed because the same data shows the size of Minnesota’s workforce declined by almost 58,000 in that period, a 1.8% drop…
But we don’t, in fact, “know those people didn’t just become unemployed because the…data shows the size of Minnesota’s workforce declined by almost 58,000 in that period,” because the same data also shows that the size of our state’s “Civilian non-institutional population” increased by 22,793 in that period.
In a recent post, “Minnesota’s struggling economy: Sluggish job growth,” I noted that:
…we can break down the growth of the population into the growth of the number of people employed and the number of people not employed. The total pool of people available to work in a state is the “Civilian non-institutional population,” which the Census Bureau defines as:
“All U.S. civilians not residing in institutional group quarters facilities such as correctional institutions, juvenile facilities, skilled nursing facilities, and other long-term care living arrangements.”
It is not clear to me why Ramstad excluded this figure from his analysis. As Figure 1 shows, using the same BLS data he cites, Minnesota’s civilian non-institutional population growth of 22,793 from December 2025 to September 2026 — or 0.5% — was higher than in 31 out of 50 states. In short, our pool of potential workers grew at a comparatively healthy rate over the period of Operation Metro Surge and since.
Figure 1: Change in civilian non-institutional population, December 2025 to September 2026
Yet, as Ramstad correctly notes, we do have that decline in employment. As Figure 2 shows, the 2.1% fall in the number of Minnesotans employed between December 2025 and September 2026 is worse than in 43 out of 50 other states.
Figure 2: Change in employment, December 2025 to September 2026
How do we reconcile relatively healthy potential employment growth shown in Figure 1 with the relatively dismal actual employment growth shown in Figure 2?
Remember this equation:
Civilian non-institutional population = Employed + Unemployed and looking for work + Unemployed and not looking for work
The number of people both employed and unemployed but looking for work is combined by the BLS to give a number for the “Civilian labor force,” or the “workforce” Ramstad correctly notes has declined by 56,961 between December 2025 and September 2026.
But this calculation completely ignores those members of the civilian non-institutional population who are unemployed and not looking for work, Minnesotans who have checked out of the labor force and employment completely. This is a significant omission, since these folks accounted for 31.7% of Minnesota’s civilian non-institutional population in December 2025 and 33.3% in September 2026. Indeed, as Figure 3 shows, the growth in the number of Minnesotans not in the labor force at all between December 2025 and September 2026, 5.4%, was greater than in 44 out of 50 states.
Figure 3: Change in number of civilian non-institutional population not in the labor force, December 2025 to September 2026
The data show that Ramstad is wrong to attribute the decline in employment in Minnesota since December 2025 to federal agents enforcing federal law and chasing people out of the state. We see, to the contrary, that Minnesota has recorded a comparatively healthy growth in potential workers since Operation Metro Surge commenced — and we are often accused of having nothing good to say about the state or its economy — but that it has done comparatively badly at turning them into actual workers by giving them jobs as shown by the comparatively large increase in the number of Minnesotans who have dropped out of the labor force altogether.
This is nothing new in Minnesota’s economy, as I showed when I looked at the data from 2014 to 2025 a couple of weeks ago. On one level, there is an element of Metro Surge becoming a convenient excuse for the current manifestations of Minnesota’s longstanding economic ills.
And on another level, there is the fundamental misapprehension that what is needed for more economic growth is more inputs, primarily of people, rather than trying to make the workers we have more productive. But, as I noted when looking at the data since 2014:
…it cannot be said that our state’s relatively slow employment growth is the result of relatively slow population growth. This means, in turn, that the solution to our relatively slow employment growth is not to try and boost population growth. Minnesota’s labor market has problems besides the growth rate of potential workers, and it is when we look at how this population growth breaks down that a concerning picture emerges.
Exactly the same picture emerges from the data from December 2025 to September 2026. Minnesota’s policymakers, and those who are candidates to be such, ought not to try and hide behind a thoroughly mistaken narrative.