Minnesota welcomed some 130,000 new residents last year. Who are they?

Mike Habighorst was among the roughly 130,000 new residents who arrived in Minnesota last year.

The move was a homecoming for Habighorst, public works director for the city of Brainerd, who spent the past three decades in Las Vegas.

After his kids finished school, Habighorst returned to his hometown of Crosby. Family and friends were a big reason (his siblings and mother all live in the Brainerd Lakes area) as was the verdant, woods-and-water landscape he had visited frequently when he lived afar. “Minnesota has always been a deep part of me,” he said. “We always had a footprint here.”

Of course, some people also left the state last year, so Minnesota’s population didn’t grow by 130,000 people overall.

While the COVID pandemic put a damper on Minnesota’s population growth, new estimates for the fiscal year 2024 show it has returned to a 0.7% annual increase, on par with the state’s average growth rate for the first two decades of the century.

Populations grow or decline due to three factors: natural change (births minus deaths), domestic migration and international migration. Minnesota state demographer Susan Brower explained how each cohort influences Minnesota’s population and shared demographic trends within those groups.

For decades, natural change drove Minnesota’s relatively steady population growth. But as birth rates have declined, migration is having greater influence, Brower explained.

During the most recent fiscal year, of the 40,000 net residents Minnesota added, about a quarter were babies and the rest were migrants.

But domestic and international migration trends look very different in Minnesota.

Since the turn of the century, Minnesota typically lost more residents to other U.S. states than it gained each year, as has been common for states in the Great Lakes region.

In the most recent fiscal year, the loss was minimal: slightly more than 1,000 residents. Brower noted that this was a significant change from Minnesota’s domestic migration patterns during the pandemic, when the state experienced a net outflow of about 10,000 residents per year in 2021, and nearly 30,000 residents in 2022.

Meanwhile, for the past several decades, Minnesota has welcomed a steady stream of people from outside the U.S. to offset domestic losses. Last year, for example, the state saw an estimated net increase of about 30,000 international migrants.

Slightly more than 100,000 people moved to Minnesota from other states last year, according to estimates from the American Community Survey. Minnesota tends mostly to receive domestic migrants from the surrounding region. The top five originating states, in order, are Wisconsin, North Dakota, Illinois, California and Iowa.

Among those who arrived in Minnesota from other states, about a third of them, including Habighorst, were born here, adding to the state’s relatively high percentage of native-born residents.

“There are many different reasons why Minnesota-born people would come back,” Brower said. “Maybe after they went to college, or after they moved away for a spell, or maybe they moved back after they retired and wanted to be with grandkids.”

In the past fiscal year, Minnesota welcomed about 30,000 newcomers from other countries.

Among international migrants, the top four countries sending people to Minnesota are India, China, Ethiopia and Mexico. Brower noted that those arriving from India and China are often coming to Minnesota for jobs or higher education. But the rising number of refugee arrivals since 2020 has increased the state’s population of international newcomers.

Looking specifically at the refugee cohort, Minnesota ranks relatively high among states with the greatest number of refugees per capita. For most of the past two decades, the state averaged a few thousand refugees each year, though that number dropped to the hundreds when the Trump administration limited refugees’ arrival and it didn’t top 1,000 again until 2023. Recently, the largest proportion of Minnesota’s refugees have been coming from Ukraine, Brower said, followed by Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

President Trump began his second term by signing a flurry of executive orders limiting immigration to the U.S. and Minnesota is likely to see a decline in international migration under his administration.

In addition to adults moving here, slightly more than 61,000 babies were born in Minnesota during the most recent annual estimate. This number is similar to the tally in recent years, but down from decades past, Brower noted. Between 2000 and 2020, for example, the total ranged from about 65,000 to 75,000 babies each year.

Where do these babies live? Brower explained that their location largely mirrors the state’s population distribution, with 57% of the babies born in the seven-county metro area (where about 55% of the state’s total population lives).

But age and fertility rates cause some deviation. As examples, Brower noted the county with the highest median age — Aitkin County, north of Mille Lacs Lake, at 56.5 years — has a slightly lower birth rate.

Meanwhile, “cultural difference in preference for family size,” Brower said, can impact fertility rates. Counties where it’s higher than average, including Nobles (home to Worthington) and Watonwan (home to St. James), tend to have larger populations of childbearing-age women who are members of newer immigrant communities.

In terms of racial identity, more than a third of infants in Minnesota are babies of color (14% are Black, 8% Latino, 7% Asian, 7% multiracial, less than 1% are American Indian). Infants are a more racially diverse cohort than the state’s overall population (about a quarter of which is made up of people of color), Brower said. And that percentage is expected to increase as the parent population gets more diverse.