Opinion | Will Minnesota still be ‘the good life’ for today’s immigrants?

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I first set foot in the U.S. 50 years ago this month, arriving in San Francisco years before many more would come through that gateway into America in pursuit of career and fortune in Silicon Valley.

But for this immigrant, my pursuit quickly turned romantic after I met a young Minnesotan who was taking a gap year before college with an au pair gig in the Bay Area. The gap stretched two more years as the love affair blossomed. Then it was my turn. Packing everything I owned into an aging VW Beetle, I drove cross country to a place I’d only vaguely heard about.

I could not have imagined that I would make a career reporting from and about the North Star State, and over time, from far beyond.

Minnesota was not a north star for many migrants when I got here, but that would begin to change in the years that followed, including after a landmark event that happened also to be my first assignment for what was then the “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS: the Hormel meatpackers strike in Austin, Minn., in 1985.

For months the workers bitterly protested Hormel’s move to cut their wages by a third, but in the end the company prevailed and the strikers were fired. Wages plummeted across the industry, and slaughterhouse work, which had become a middle-class occupation in the postwar decades, went back to its 19th-century roots as an employer of new immigrants, an on-ramp into the American workforce where the jobs require knife-handling more than English skills.

Immigration — documented and not — has moved the census needle toward a more diverse Minnesota, indispensable also to livestock and dairy farms, the construction trades and across the professions in health care. The rapidity of these changes is testing our long-held sense of exceptionalism, amplified on that famous 1973 cover of Time (“The Good Life in Minnesota”) and a decade later by Neal Peirce and Jerry Hagstrom in their bestseller, “The Book of America: Inside Fifty States Today.” They wrote:

“Search America from sea to sea and you will not find a state that has offered as close a model to the ideal of a successful society as Minnesota.”

And everyone is so polite, so nice, I remember thinking when I first arrived in Duluth, having enrolled at the College of St. Scholastica. This was vaguely comforting to me, an immigrant uncertain of my reception in a place so foreign to my background. My first job while in college was at Sears, then the nation’s largest retailer, eventually landing in the call center. With a broadcasting aspiration and a Minnesota native girlfriend, I’d come to sound much less foreign than I looked, well-suited, the store manager thought, to peddling one of the company’s most profitable products: extended warranties.

I spent hours cold-calling recent purchasers of washers and fridges to convince them of grave perils they’d be protected from with a “maintenance agreement.” My sales tally for the three months I lasted —zero — offered an early career lesson: You must believe in what you’re selling to sell it.

Other lessons came more painfully, like an interview years later with a prominent lobbyist, now deceased. She represented the pro-choice side of a report I was preparing on a parental consent law Minnesota had passed.

“This is Fred at KTCA [now TPT] and I hear you’re going to be on ‘Almanac’ this week,” I said, referring to the Friday evening public affairs program. “Could you come in a few minutes earlier so we can shoot a walk shot for the MacNeil/Lehrer story?”

Sure, she replied. “And it’ll give me a chance to clarify some things I said in that interview. I really wasn’t impressed with the reporter you sent out.”

“The reporter?” I asked before realizing that she thought she was talking to someone else.

“The Indian fellow!” she bellowed impatiently.

“I don’t know how to easily put this to you,” I managed, a stunned moment later. “You are speaking to that person.”

“Well,” she muttered. “I’ll apologize after I take my foot out of my mouth.”

“That’s OK,” I said, “but just so I get my story straight, were there things you thought I didn’t understand, questions I asked or didn’t ask?”

Nothing specific, she said. “You just looked like you weren’t getting some points I was trying to make.”

You just looked like… .

It was not the first time that I’ve elicited candor in phone conversations that an in-person encounter likely never would. These encounters have been instructive in understanding human tendencies toward tribalism and stereotyping, and in our state, the veneer of Minnesota Nice.

Our storytelling is about human suffering in some of the world’s most distressed places, using strong characters and solutions-oriented narratives whenever possible. This approach helps disprove an enduring myth that “foreign” news is not interesting to American audiences, whether of PBS or the Under-Told Stories Project, which makes our documentaries available in classrooms at the University of St. Thomas, or anywhere else, for free.

All this could not have happened without so many quality-of-life ingredients I found here in Minnesota — and a healthy dollop of luck.

Speaking of which, the girlfriend morphed into my spouse 44 years ago, who went on to be a revered elementary teacher in St. Paul Public Schools. Our three children — public-educated from kindergarten to medical and law school in Minnesota — traveled widely, but returned to forge or continue careers here.

I’ve been lucky to work for the highly respected “PBS NewsHour,” a platform that’s helped make the foreign less foreign. For more than two decades, the work was mostly overseas until the killing of George Floyd. Its aftermath brought me back full circle to report on human suffering closer to home, on the glaring disparities between white and many nonwhite Minnesotans in education, housing and health care.

Those long-ago striking meatpackers lost their battle to preserve a comfortable middle-class livelihood that, paradoxically, afforded their children education and career options far beyond the drudgery of meat factories. How the offspring of today’s meatpackers, roofers and personal care attendants fare in the years ahead will be one proxy for how, or even whether, Minnesota’s legacy of strong civic engagement, philanthropy and education will beget a society that can live up to the billing of that long-ago book on America.

“I am not an optimist,” he told me. “I am a prisoner of hope.”