Estimating Immigrant Populations

Barbara J. Ronningen, Minnesota State Demographic Center

Refugees coming into a state or city bring almost no material goods with them, but do have many physical, emotional and economic needs. Consequently, service providers - whether government, educational, medical, not-for-profit or private - need to gauge the magnitude of this population. In Minnesota in the 1990s, the foreign born population more than doubled. And unlike the previous decade, immigrants in the 1990s came from a very large number of countries. Many - about 40% - came as refugees. Unlike previous decades, these immigrants settled throughout the state. Strong job creation in the 1990s drew immigrants and refugees to food processing plants in rural areas. Most stayed in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area, but significant numbers settled in non-metropolitan areas. The result of large numbers of new residents was that Minnesota, its counties, cities and schools needed to know who these new residents were, how many there were, and what to expect in the coming years. This paper will describe the datasets used to estimate this population. In particular, it will discuss the necessity of using "soft" data as well as hard numeric data - in other words, both ethnographic as well as statistical methods were used to approximate the size of these new populations. The paper will discuss how to deal with data sets that reflect only part of an immigrant population as well as how to interweave expert knowledge into the process. How does a researcher estimate the population when there is no baseline from which to establish multipliers? Finally, the data from the 2000 Census has proven the methods used in Minnesota to estimate immigrant populations very accurate, especially given the high mobility of this population.