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JOHN BIEWEN: The NiCo metal finishing plant in South Minneapolis is clean and updated. It pays new employees $8 an hour plus benefits with no experience or education required. But company officials say they sometimes have trouble finding workers in the Twin Cities tight labor market.

Until recently, the plant's workforce was mostly white. But in the past few years, NiCo has hired a number of African-Americans recently arrived from out of state. 27-year-old Steve McMorris came from Chicago four years ago. He says he couldn't support his family on a part-time job at a Chicago grocery store. Within a few months after moving to Minneapolis, he had a job at NiCo.

STEVE MCMORRIS: Well, right now, I'm up to 11.25 an hour.

JOHN BIEWEN: Do you think you could be making that kind of money in Chicago right now?

STEVE MCMORRIS: No way. No. Maybe-- if you went way out into the suburbs and had 20 years of experience in something-- you could. But not within four years, no.

JOHN BIEWEN: Job growth in the Twin Cities is not as dramatic as the Industrial boom that prompted a flood of Black migration from the South to cities like Chicago and Detroit a half century ago. But unemployment in Minneapolis-Saint Paul is at a rock bottom 2.6%. Area restaurants, retailers, and manufacturing plants are festooned with help wanted signs.

ALTON LANCASTER: What's up, partner? What can I get you?

SPEAKER: I'm doing 6-inch tuna on whole wheat.

ALTON LANCASTER: How about you?

JOHN BIEWEN: Alton Lancaster and Eddie Briggs earned $6 or $7 an hour making sandwiches at a Subway shop in a downtown Minneapolis office building. Lancaster moved in from Chicago last spring. Briggs came from the depressed steel town, Gary, Indiana, two years ago. Briggs says you may not get rich in Minneapolis, but there's no excuse for not finding a job in the city.

ED BRIGGS: If you want something, Minnesota is a place to get it because I came up here on a Monday. I got here on Monday night to be exact, at 10 o'clock I got here. And that Thursday morning at 8:00, I had two jobs.

JOHN BIEWEN: Minnesota's black population has nearly tripled in less than two decades from 50,000 in 1980 to about 140,000 today. It's easy to find success stories among Black newcomers, but other kinds of stories get more attention in the local media, poor Blacks who moved to Minneapolis and remain on welfare or get arrested for drug dealing or homicide. In a Metropolitan area that's still 90% white, those stories fuel the perception that African-Americans from the ghettos of larger cities bring problems that whites don't bring.

BARBARA CARLSON: This is a city very close to under siege. It doesn't make any difference where they are from, if they are poor. But it is a poverty issue and very, very often, it's an African-American issue.

JOHN BIEWEN: Barbara Carlson, the former Minneapolis City Council member, talk radio host, and current candidate for mayor says, she wants to take back Minneapolis and restore the city to what she considers its former greatness. She says Minnesota has been too welcoming to poor Blacks from out of state by paying some of the highest welfare benefits in the Midwest. She points to nicknames for Minneapolis that refer to its spiking homicide rate in recent years and its reputation as a welfare haven.

BARBARA CARLSON: We might as well be the Statue of Liberty. We are the city that's been murderapolis. We are the city that's been moneyapolis, and people don't want to discuss it. And every time you talk about these issues, you are charged with the word racist.

And I'll tell you, when somebody calls you racist, all dialogue ceases. The issue is the poverty that is growing in Minneapolis today. Today, they're coming in.

JOHN BIEWEN: Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton says such talk is harmful and paints African-American newcomers as uniformly poor and troubled.

SHARON SAYLES BELTON: If you looked at the growth in population amongst African-Americans in the community, the bulk of the people that are migrating in are professional people who are making contribution to the community.

JOHN BIEWEN: Twin cities corporations have attracted thousands of Black professionals since the 1960s and continue to do so. But census data shows that since the mid 1980s, more than half of all Blacks who moved to Minnesota have had incomes below the federal poverty line. By contrast, barely 10% of Blacks moving to Atlanta during that period were poor.

[INAUDIBLE]

JOHN BIEWEN: Many new arrivals to Minneapolis, spend time here at Hennepin county's family shelter. Surveys have found that some 60% of people in Twin Cities shelters moved to the state within the past two years. And shelter officials say more than three out of four residents are Black.

Greg Owen is a sociologist with the Wilder Research Center, a Saint Paul nonprofit that surveys shelter residents. He says newcomers give many reasons for coming to Minnesota-- jobs, better schools, safer neighborhoods. But he says the safety net is a factor for some.

GREG OWEN: Frankly, it's known outside of Minnesota that Minnesota provides a good shelter system, good housing opportunities for lower income families. And a number of the responses that we get relate to that specifically. I thought I could get on my feet more easily here in Minnesota.

JOHN BIEWEN: But Minnesota's new welfare law, which took effect July 1st, pays newcomers no more than they got in the state they came from. It's too early to say whether that will slow the in-migration of poor people. One school of thought says as welfare reform takes hold across the country and recipients are increasingly pushed into the job market, Minnesota will draw more poor people than ever because of its abundance of low-skilled jobs.

John Powell, a law professor and director of the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota, says what's striking is not that Blacks are moving to the Twin cities, but that the region remains so overwhelmingly white for so long. It's still the whitest of the nation's 15 largest Metropolitan areas. Powell says some white Minnesotans display a disturbing preoccupation with Blacks moving to the state.

JOHN POWELL: And I listened to some of the talk radio shows, just incredible, incredibly fixated on Gary and Chicago. I mean, and again, one would think that those areas have been completely depopulated by all the hordes of Black gangsters moving here from those two places.

JOHN BIEWEN: Minneapolis Police say while most poor Blacks moving to the city are not involved in crime, more than 3/4 of the city's hard-core street gang members moved to town from Chicago. Blacks make up just 13% of Minneapolis's population, but 2/3 of the city's homicide victims and perpetrators in the past three years were Black. Powell says he's not interested in glossing over those facts, but he says Minnesotans should try to understand the economic despair and social isolation that created gang culture in the ghettos of Chicago and Detroit and try to avoid replicating those conditions in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Powell says so far, the Twin Cities aren't responding well. He points to the high rate of middle-class flight to the suburbs and to studies showing housing discrimination against Blacks is common in Minneapolis's middle-class neighborhoods.

JOHN POWELL: We manufacture despair here, and then we use that despair, we use that hopelessness to push people further down. So they're behaving badly. So we don't want them in the neighborhood. We isolate them even more, and we get this vicious cycle.

JOHN BIEWEN: Powell says, the Twin Cities are an important test case of whether an American city that in some ways is just beginning to deal with race can do better than older, larger cities have done. The US Census predicts that Minneapolis-Saint Paul will remain the number one Northern destination for African-Americans for the next generation. For Minnesota Public Radio, I'm John Biewen.