March 15, 2022
St. Paul, MN
2021
Overall Score
2.83
Policy Score
4.17
Socioeconomic Score
1.50
St. Paul earns a score of 2.83 on the strength of its strong Legal Support and Government Leadership scores. There is ample room for growth in the Job Opportunities, Economic Prosperity, and Livability categories.
“Words just resonate,” says writer, activist and Vietnamese immigrant Chay Douangphouxay. “With the right words, you can either build or break a person.” And so Douangphouxay, who came to the United States as a child refugee and has a full-time job in healthcare development at Target, dedicates all of her free time to uplifting Asian American women and girls through literature and activism. Her children’s book, Tawan: The Sun Girl, is aimed at addressing the scarcity of Asian-American literature in the public school system. And her poetry chapbook, Remission: Finding Light In the Midst of Social Darkness, was published with the support of the Minnesota Humanities Center and has been used nationwide as an educational tool on issues of class, gender, and race.
It’s our entire background and our heritage. That’s what makes America so unique and so wonderful.
In addition to her writing, Douangphouxay uses her voice to uplift other immigrants. She is the co-founder of the Twin Cities Chapter of National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF), a national organization that advances social justice for Asian Pacific Islander women and girls. She was inspired to do this work because her mother was a teenage bride who married an abusive man twice her age. Only after coming to the United States was her mother able to get a divorce. And when she did, she turned their home in the north Minneapolis projects into a makeshift drop-in shelter for other abused women. “My mom raised me with a foundation of service for other people,” says Douangphouxay. And that service extends to immigration reform, including lobbying on Capitol Hill with the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC), where she sits on the board.
Today, Douangphouxay sees significant economic contributions from immigrants all around St. Paul. “If you just walk down Wake Street in Minneapolis or you walk down University, all the local shops are pretty much immigrant-owned,” she says. “When you look at the factories and at other businesses, even with myself at Target, there’s lots of immigrants. They’re all part of our booming economy in Minnesota. That’s part of why Minnesota has such a more stable economy, compared to the rest of the country. There’s so much diversity in the type of contributions and in the different professions.”
In America, Douangphouxay believes, everybody is an immigrant, and everybody has the beautiful opportunity to stand on Capitol Hill and have their voice heard. “It’s our entire background and our heritage. That’s what makes America so unique and so wonderful,” she says. “We must be humble in our roots and build a country that encourages immigration and can be a refuge for people who seek it. Had I not come here, I probably wouldn’t be able to write the books that I did or be the voice for a lot of people that don’t have a voice.”
Abe Dalu, who is from Oromia, Ethiopia, has a PhD in toxicology and experience in preclinical drug safety assessment. His wife, Aster, also from Oromia, Ethiopia, is a registered nurse. So when the pair decided to launch their own business—Dalu’s layoff during the Recession motivated them to seek firmer control over their future—a healthcare venture made sense.
The couple enrolled in a 10-week small-business course at the Neighborhood Development Center, then began pulling from their savings and retirement. To accept Medicare patients, they would have to provide services—nursing, physical and occupational therapy, and home healthcare—free of charge for a 10-month evaluation period. “It’s very challenging to get that certification,” says Dalu. “We got it on the first shot.”
Now, five years after that arduous trial, A&A Reliable Home Health Care—named for Abe and Aster—has close to 60 full-time employees in St. Paul and is on course to continue expansion. “I would say that I’m behind my expectation,” says Dalu. “But I’m happy where we are.”
For Dalu, reinvention is nothing new. Dalu is an Oromo, a member of the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia. He graduated from high school shortly after the Derg, a communist revolutionary force, assumed power and restricted travel to western nations. To receive a higher education, Dalu had to go to the former Soviet Union, where in 1984 he received a master’s degree in agronomy.
But he says returning home to “a Marxist-Leninist country” that jailed people for practicing their religion was not an option. As a boy, Dalu had attended a school run by American and European missionaries from the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and he remained a practicing Christian.
“So I decided to flee to West Berlin,” he says. He talked his way to a port of exit, where he bought a train ticket to West Berlin and applied for political asylum in West Germany. Nine months later, he was granted asylum to the United States and was resettled in Monroe, Louisiana.
Then came the next kink: Degrees from the Soviet Union were not well-received by U.S. employers. “I couldn’t find a job,” he says. So Dalu earned a master’s degree in biology and a PhD in toxicology from the University of Louisiana at Monroe, and, following post-doctoral research in Alabama, worked at an FDA lab in Arkansas and for Dow Corning in Michigan before moving to Minnesota in 2002 to take a job at 3M. He later commuted to Wisconsin to direct drug-safety research before settling full time in St. Paul to start a business.
We created jobs. This keeps me thrilled being able to do that, and being able to help seniors and disabled individuals.
Today, nearly two-thirds of A&A Reliable’s clients are U.S.-born patients, and half are senior citizens—a population increasingly eager to age at home. About 90 percent of company revenue has gone back into the company to hire and expand. “We created jobs,” Dalu says. “This keeps me thrilled being able to do that, and being able to help seniors and disabled individuals.”
John Barker bought the bankrupt Commonwealth Care Center, a nursing home in northwest St. Paul, in 1991 and vowed to “make it a place people wanted to come to.” He spent years upgrading the facility, adding two floors, dozens of private rooms, and modern air conditioning and heating. He renamed it St. Anthony Park Home, after the neighborhood, which, aptly, is named after St. Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost people and things.
Now, with a fully functioning 84-bed, short- and long- term care facility, Barker needs staff. Specifically, he needs 160 employees to operate at maximum capacity, a critical threshold given the low profit margins allotted to any place funded largely by Medicare and Medicaid. Were those staffing levels to drop, “certainly we wouldn’t be able to have nearly as many residents,” he says. “And whether I’d be in business, I don’t even know. You have to have a certain number of occupied beds to cover overhead.”
While at any given time about 90 percent of St. Anthony Park patients are Minnesotans who were born in the United States, most of the workers who tend to them are immigrants and refugees. This includes about 70 percent of the nursing assistants, and more than a third of the nurses. “We couldn’t do anywhere near what we do now without them,” Barker says. At least half of the dietary and housekeeping staff are also foreign-born.
I don’t run into any administrators in the Twin Cities who don’t have lots and lots of foreign-born workers. I don’t think there’d be a healthcare industry, at least in the Twin Cities, if not for people from other countries.
“In my opinion, they’ve never taken jobs away from people who are U.S.-born. I just don’t have those people coming through my door,” Barker says. “For every 100 people who apply for a job, if 10 of them were white, U.S.-born Americans, that would be high. There just don’t seem to be that many people who are interested.”
Many of these new Americans are recent arrivals and graduates of the medical careers training program run by the International Institute of Minnesota, a resettlement agency. Launched in 1990, the medical training program has placed close to 2,100 nursing assistants in facilities throughout the Twin Cities. The nursing-assistant graduates have a 99 percent retention rate, an impressive statistic for an industry with a 60 percent turnover rate nationally. “Our clients come from a place that respects elders,” says Jane Graupman, the institute’s executive director. “They’ve taken care of their elders so they have that experience.”
This immigrant and refugee workforce doesn’t just allow healthcare facilities like Barker’s to serve Minnesotans. It also allows them to hire far more nurses, nurse managers, physical therapists, social workers, and administrators—positions all largely held by U.S.-born workers.
“I don’t run into any administrators in the Twin Cities who don’t have lots and lots of foreign-born workers,” says Barker. “I don’t think there’d be a healthcare industry, at least in the Twin Cities, if not for people from other countries.”
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