One Thing Leads To Another, And Soon, One Ends Up In A Place Totally Unexpected -- I'm Talking About Surfing The Net -- March 19, 2016

Updates

Later, 9: 05 p.m. Central Time: completely unrelated but after posting the stories below with emphasis on amount states are paying for education, my wife tells me that one of the local school districts is asking voters to approve a bond proposition for $220 million for a high school football stadium here in north Texas. Those voters suggesting $220 million is too much for a football stadium are a) new to Texas; and, b) have not seen Friday Night Lights, the movie about Odessa, TX, and the Permian High Panthers. Just saying.
 

Original Post

 

First, the graphs, from Ballotpedia (data from 2013 seems to be most recent available):

One article, from The StarTribune:

The ex­act num­bers of So­malis moving to Minnesota from oth­er states are hard to track. But there’s little doubt their ranks have swelled, too. The federal Office of Ref­u­gee Resettlement com­piles partial numbers showing about 2,620 total ref­u­gee ar­ri­vals from oth­er states in 2013, up from 1,835 two years earli­er — making Minnesota the state with the high­est in-mi­gra­tion by far.

“This has al­ways been an is­sue for Minnesota,” said Kim Dettmer of Lutheran So­cial Service, one of the ag­en­cies that helps re­set­tle refu­gees who come di­rect­ly to Minnesota. “We have in-mi­gra­tion. We don’t re­al­ly have out-migration.”

Af­ter ar­riv­ing from Kampala, U­gan­da, Ayan Ahmed and her nine chil­dren, ages 4 to 18, spent six months in Phoe­nix. There, Catholic Charities had lined up a fur­nished four-bed­room home for the fam­i­ly and a neu­rol­o­gist for Ahmed’s eld­est son, who is blind.

The article begins with a photograph with this caption:

Recent Somali immigrants Nur Ali, right, and his wife Mahado Mohamed, left, sit with their six children Shukri Shukri, from left, 9, one-week-old Ifrah Shukri, in her mother's arms, Ugbad Shukri, 7, Hafifa Shukri, 4, Antar Shukri, 10, and one-year-old Ikra Shukri in their apartment at Mary's Place transitional apartments in downtown Minneapolis. The family arrived in the United States four months ago, first landing in Connecticut before coming to Minnesota.

And then the lede:

A week af­ter the Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment re­set­tled them in Con­nec­ti­cut this sum­mer, Nur Ali and his wife, Mahado Mo­ha­med, had de­cid­ed: They were mov­ing to Minnesota.

Tales of the state’s large So­ma­li com­muni­ty had in­trigued them back in the Ken­yan ref­u­gee camp where they had mar­ried and had five chil­dren. Now, a So­ma­li man they met in Hartford told them all re­cent ar­ri­vals head to Minnesota, home of “Little Moga­dis­hu.”

After a major dip in 2008, the year­ly num­bers of new So­ma­li refu­gees in Minnesota have re­bounded stead­i­ly. The num­ber of So­malis re­set­tled in the state has more than trip­led in four years. As resettlements nationally have picked up, more So­malis are also arriving here after brief stints in other states — often trading early support from resettlement agencies for the company of more fellow Somalis.

It looks like they're going to have to widen I-98. The west-bound lanes.