Pew: 95,000 illegal immigrants in Minnesota

Earlier this week Wilder Research put out an immigration report for the Minneapolis Foundation that noted, among many other things, how hard it is to estimate how many illegal immigrants there are in Minnesota.

That report noted that estimates it considered not entirely reliable ranged from 55,000 to 85,000.

Today, the Pew Hispanic Center put the number for 2009 at 95,000. Actually that's an estimate within the range of 80,000 to 120,000 and is down from an estimated 110,000 a year earlier.

The numbers are deep in a national report that says illegal immigration has dropped for the nation as a whole and that the number of what it calls unauthorized immigrants now stands at 11.1 million for the country. The report's authors caution that state-level numbers are not precise.

Minnesota is well down the ranking of states, home to fewer unauthorized immigrants than other populous northern tier states like Wisconsin and Washington.

Pew estimates that some 70,000 unauthorized immigrants are in the labor force, about 2.4 percent of the total. That's less than half the 5.1 percent figure for the nation as a whole.

The state-level numbers are in Appendix A of the report.

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