How many unauthorized immigrants live in Minnesota by county and how are those estimates produced?
Executive summary
Two reputable, nonpartisan research centers put Minnesota’s unauthorized-immigrant population in the ballpark of roughly 100,000–130,000 as of the most recent published estimates that use 2019–23 and 2023 survey data; more granular county tallies exist in Migration Policy Institute (MPI) and other data tools but must be pulled from their county spreadsheets or interactive tools because media summaries typically report only state or metro totals [1] [2] [3] [4].
1. What the headline numbers say about Minnesota
Pew Research’s 2023-based tables (published in 2025) list about 130,000 unauthorized immigrants in Minnesota, equal to roughly 2.2% of the state population, while MPI’s profile and reporting commonly cite a somewhat smaller total—about 100,000—for the state using its own imputation and weighting approach [1] [2] [3] [5].
2. County-level data: where it exists and where it doesn’t
MPI provides topline estimates for 287 counties and detailed profiles for the 135 counties with the largest unauthorized populations, accessible via their data hub and spreadsheet, but those county rows are not reproduced in these news summaries, so the precise per-county counts must be extracted from MPI’s downloadable spreadsheet or interactive tool rather than inferred from press coverage [4]. Other tools — for example the Center for Migration Studies/IPUMS-based tools and state data hubs — also offer county breakdowns or county-level foreign‑born snapshots, but they sample ACS microdata and apply privacy rules that suppress very small counts and round estimates [6] [7].
3. How researchers produce these estimates — the core methodology
The dominant practice among Pew, MPI and similar nonpartisan groups is to impute legal status for noncitizen survey respondents in the American Community Survey (ACS) and sometimes the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), classify those who don’t meet legal‑status criteria as unauthorized, and then weight those results to external benchmarks that represent control totals for origin countries and regions derived from Department of Homeland Security administrative admissions data minus modeled deaths and emigration [5] [4]. MPI explicitly describes assigning legal status in Census survey data, using pooled ACS years and SIPP to identify likely legal versus unauthorized noncitizens, then scaling those microdata-based tallies to match independent control totals [4] [5].
4. Important technical adjustments and benchmarks
Control totals used to benchmark unauthorized counts are calculated by subtracting estimated legal immigrant admissions (from DHS records, adjusted for deaths and emigration) from ACS-born immigrant totals for each origin country or region; estimates are then reweighted so the imputed unauthorized totals align with those controls, a step meant to correct biases in survey reporting and sample coverage [5]. Several groups differ in exact pooling periods, definitions (for example whether to include DACA, TPS, or parolees), rounding rules, or which microdata years are pooled, which explains why Pew, MPI and older estimates can diverge by tens of thousands [5] [4] [8].
5. Limits, uncertainties, and competing views
All such estimates are inherently uncertain — analysts and fact-checkers stress these are model-based figures that use a roughly one-percent sample (ACS), are likely undercounts because unauthorized respondents may not report status truthfully or be sampled, and are time‑lagged (Pew’s widely cited 130,000 number reflects 2023-based data released in 2025, not 2026) [1] [9] [6]. Alternative older ranges exist in local reports (one earlier estimate cited 55,000–85,000), and state or federal agencies such as DHS publish partial state estimates using different methods, so comparisons require attention to year, definition, and geographic unit [8] [1] [7].
6. How to get precise county figures and interpret them
To obtain county-by-county numbers for Minnesota, consult MPI’s downloadable spreadsheet of 287 counties and the MPI county profiles for the 135 largest counties (the MPI data hub), or use the Center for Migration Studies/IPUMS tools, keeping in mind rounding to the nearest 100 and privacy suppression for very small counts; reporters and policymakers should reference the methodology pages that accompany those downloads to match the estimate year and definition before drawing conclusions [4] [6].