The Mayor of Minneapolis says his political coalition’s standoff with ICE is demolishing his unusual and peculiar Sanctuary City Economy.
“I’m sitting at my desk here and just got some really sobering figures about the impact that this operation, [ICE’s] Metro Surge, is having on our communities,” Mayor Jacob Frey posted to X on Tuesday night:
There’s a mass impact on our small and local businesses. Small local businesses, collectively, are losing between 10 and $20 million dollars every single week. Businesses along cultural corridors are down at least 50 percent and the Latino-owned businesses and Somali-owned businesses are drastically below that. Hotels have lost about $4.4 million because of cancelations and so for those that claim that they care about our economy and care about businesses, there’s a very quick and straightforward antidote to bring these businesses back, which is to have Operation Metro sSrge and to have ICE leave our city.
Let’s bring the economy back. Let’s help these businesses out. Let’s make sure that our city can return to this great comeback that we were seeing, and let’s get ICE to leave.
Frey’s complaint is plausible because Democrats have built the city’s economy on a peculiar institution — the government’s long-term delivery of many foreign workers, consumers, and renters. That historically bizarre foundation is fundamentally different from — and corrosive too — the typical free, level, and uniform marketplace rules that govern American citizens, whether they are employers or employees.
Minneapolis’s resulting “Sanctuary City Economy” enables and worsens many civic problems, including a high share of lower-productivity workers, and the conflicts caused by having residents with illegal, uncertain, or subsidiary legal status.
The city also struggles with two-jurisdiction communities, corrupt business practices, politicized agencies, patronage politics, high taxes, a pay-to-play political machine, scare politics, the loss of high-productivity jobs, large wealth disparities, private regulation, vigilante crime, low-income ethnic enclaves, political instability, and a pro-establishment media.
The institution’s operations are most visible in the city’s lowest-wage sectors, such as the restaurants that use cheap imported workers to subsidize the true cost of serving fresh foods in mid-winter to older bourgeois liberals.
“The Twin Cities food scene was built by immigrants, from owners to line cooks to investors to chefs to dishwashers, those who are undocumented or have legal status or are U.S. citizens,” MSPMag.com reported on February 3, adding:
I mean that one owner told me he drives around with a “safety blanket” in his back seat to cover up his staff if they’re pulled over on an early-morning ride to work. I mean that nearly every restaurant I contacted is significantly short-staffed because many of their workers, both those with legal status and not, are sheltering in place … I mean that one Latina business owner told me she hasn’t seen most of her regulars—the same families that have dined at her restaurant for generations—in months. When one old friend did come in for takeout, ICE whisked him away as soon as he walked out the door … One manager I ‘spoke to had six staff members taken.
“Among the restaurants I interviewed, business has plummeted anywhere from 20 to 70 percent since ICE operations have escalated,” she wrote, adding:
No restaurants have been hit harder by ICE operations in Minnesota than immigrant-owned or founded businesses, especially those along cultural corridors like Lake Street, which are being heavily surveilled and patrolled. Let’s take Mercado Central as an example. The market, which first opened in 1997, has survived so much: a recession, turmoil among vendors, a pandemic, a social uprising. Now it’s on the brink of closure because its 35 family-run vendors have lost 90 to 100 percent of their income, and if they can’t pay rent, the cooperative may lose the building.
The Minneapolis version of this peculiar institution has counterparts elsewhere in the United States.
Los Angeles, New York City, Portland, Boston, and Seattle also support Sanctuary City Economies where poor migrants cut wages, spike housing costs, and drive out productive Middle-Class Americans.
Nationwide, federal immigration polices have created expanding Indian enclaves in Texas and California that control large swathes of the nation’s information technology business. The United States also has a Sikh population in California and Eastern Europeans in the Midwest that play a huge role in the nation’s underfunded trucking sector. Similarly, illegal-migrant Mexicans play a huge role in blue-collar work nationwide, while illegal Chinese migrants play an outside role in the nation’s narcotics and crime sectors.
The myriad peculiar civic flaws of Sanctuary City Economies and of multi-national enclaves are being exposed because American voters elected President Donald Trump in 2024 to treat the civic and economic damage being imposed by mass migration.
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This treatment is also disrupting foreign business enclaves in other cities, such as Chicago and Los Angeles.
In Washington DC, however, Trump is zig-zagging towards a post-migration, high-productivity, high-wage economy.
“We’re going to need robots … to make our economy run because we do not have enough people,” he told Breitbart News in August, adding:
We don’t have enough people to do it. So we have to get efficient … we’ll probably add to [the existing workforce] through robotically—it’s going to be robotically … It’s going to be big. Then, somebody is going to have to make the robots. The whole thing, it feeds on itself … we’re going to streamline things.
“We need efficiency,” Trump said.
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