Prompts winter weather advisories as cold air moves in Friday night

MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all. 

Turn Up Your Support

Melvin and Sonia Lobo moved from Mumbai to Edina with their 2-year-old, Zoe, a few months ago.


 
"We don't know anyone," Melvin said. "It's like starting your life from scratch, with nothing."
 


Melvin and Sonia said they moved to Minnesota for work — and to create opportunity for their daughter.

 
"You need to do something different to move ahead," he said. "Mostly it was for my daughter. We thought she would have a better place to stay. ... If she goes to school, she would have much better facilities out here."

 
The Lobos are among the roughly 428,000 people living in Minnesota who were born outside the United States. A growing number of those foreign-born Minnesotans are from India, a region — South Central Asia — from which the state draws its highest-earning and most highly educated new workers.

 
Melvin Lobo is an engineer who designs apps for Quinnox Consulting, a tech company that serves Fortune 500 clients in the metro area. For Indians who work internationally, he said, the goal is to budget, and "to earn as much as you can for whatever time period you are out here, so cut short the expenses."

 
U.S. Census data show the state's residents who were born in South Central Asia are about three times more likely than the state's total population to earn more than $75,000. And they come here for higher-paying jobs: Eighty-four percent of South Central Asian-born workers here have jobs in management, business, science or the arts.

 
They also tend to have advanced degrees: Ninety percent of the state's population over 25 who were born in South Central Asia have a bachelor's degree or higher. Just a third of Minnesota's total population over 25 has reached that level of education.
 

More than three-quarters of Minnesota's South Central Asian-born population is from India.

 
"Those individuals are coming here with those credentials for very different reasons than we're seeing people arriving here from places like Laos and Somalia," said Steve Hine, a labor economist from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development.

 
Those who left Laos or Somalia often fled their countries because of civil war or conflict, Hine said. That's not the case for most migrants now arriving from India.

 
"Many of these people of Indian origin are coming here with backgrounds in areas like IT and [management]," he said. "Those have frequently been identified as areas of difficulty for employers to find individuals with the right skill sets." 

 
Feroze Hamid is from eastern India. He's a new transplant to Minnesota, and works in Shakopee designing field instruments and control systems for a subsidiary of the technology company Emerson Electric.

 
"If we didn't have a skill set that was different, or a skill set that created value in some capacity, we wouldn't be welcome, if that's right to say," he said.

 
Hamid's wife, Mariam Shaheen, is a journalist. She said she's found Minnesotans to be friendly. But some, she said, have pre-conceived notions about Indians:
 

"You probably come from a not-so-economically well-off background; you're here because you're looking for a better opportunity; and you probably don't want to leave. That's the general opinion that people seem to have.

 
"But then we've met other people too who don't hold that opinion, who are open to the fact that yes, you're here and probably creating value, and you might want to not settle here and leave at some point."

 
Shaheen and Hamid both have bachelor's degrees or higher. The same is true for their parents, who also worked internationally.

 
Last year, the U.S. government issued the bulk of its H-1B visas, which it grants to workers from outside the U.S. who are specialists in particular fields, to Asian Indians in high-skill occupations.

 
 
"We're here because we're employable," Hamid said. "We are able to bring a skill that is not available easy here, or some other differentiation that's present, otherwise why would someone be willing to recruit and individual halfway around the world, fly that individual all the way here, and then employ and take care of that person?"

Business and Economic News

Shows

All Things Considered

Doualy Xaykaothao

Author

A growing number of Minnesota's roughly 428,000 foreign-born residents are from India, South Central Asians who make up the highest-earning and most highly educated new Minnesotans.

Workers from South Central Asia are state's most educated, highest-earning

Go Deeper.

Like this?