Tibetan Minnesotans are part of a diaspora shaped by exile. In the early nineteen-fifties, China's army took control of Tibet. After a failed uprising at the end of that decade, the Dalai Lama and more than eighty thousand Tibetans escaped, mainly to India and Nepal. Over the following decades, exile communities built settlements, schools and monasteries there. Many Tibetans who later came to Minnesota were born or raised in those communities rather than in Tibet itself.
In the early nineteen-nineties, a federal immigration law authorized immigrant visas for one thousand Tibetans living in India and Nepal. This became known as the Tibetan U.S. Resettlement Project. The visas were spread across about twenty-two sites in the United States, and the Twin Cities became the largest site, with about 160 Tibetans resettled here. The project had strict conditions: arrivals needed a sponsor or host family and a job, and only one member of a family could apply at first. Spouses and children could join after about three years. Local volunteers and a Tibetan organizer who had arrived in Minnesota in the nineteen-eighties helped arrange housing and work, and the Tibetan American Foundation of Minnesota was founded to support the effort.
The community grew through family reunification and later arrivals. By the mid-two-thousands there were more than 1,300 Tibetans in Minnesota. MNopedia reports that about 3,500 people of Tibetan descent now live in the state, the second-largest Tibetan American community in the country after New York's.
There is a useful data lesson here. The Minnesota Department of Health's cumulative table of primary refugee arrivals lists only about fifty arrivals from Tibet across more than four decades. That is not because the community is small. The resettlement visas were immigrant visas, not refugee admissions, and many later arrivals came through family sponsorship or other routes. Tibetans may also be recorded under China, India or Nepal, depending on the document. If you rely on one data source or on country of birth alone, Tibetan Minnesotans can disappear from view. Asking people how they identify, where it helps the service, gives a truer picture.
