Startrib this morning

The StarTribune (one of our local papers) has a number of very interesting pieces this morning. Lori Sturdevant’s essay points off to a new report released by a team at the Hubert Humphrey Institute at the U that discusses “What works: Stronger policies for public services in Minnesota.” There is much in this report that ideologues on either side may question — it neither suggests government get out of the business of meeting human needs, nor suggests that government is always the best way to do so — but I was taken by its attention to careful social science research as a means for proposing some strong steps forward.

There's also a great timeline of immigrants to Minnesota that begins on page AA1 of the OpEx section, but I can't seem to find it online. The story is entitled "From huddled masses" and is interesting itself, but I find the timeline most compelling -- particularly for the ways in which it points out that the highest numbers of immigrants came to Minnesota quite long ago. This statistic should not surprise us, but I think that people have a tendency to think of immigrants these days as somehow "different from us," rather than in continuity.