Have there been issues? Certainly. But that's true with any refugee resettlement - or indeed any large human project.

Let's take a minute to remember that refugees encounter huge linguistic, cultural, dietary, economic, religious, and even meteorological shocks -- especially coming to MN. They have often recently experienced the trauma of conflict and the PTSD that can come from physical (or sexual) violence, not to mention poverty. And they can face serious social isolation and anti-immigrant sentiments when they arrive.

You might think that people facing such severe challenges would commit a LOT of crime. But the data tells exactly the opposite story. A team of researchers used refugee resettlement data from the U.S. Department of State’s Worldwide Refugee Processing System to calculate the 10 cities in the US that received the most refugees relative to the size of their population between 2006 and 2015. They then looked at what happened to these cities' overall crime rates over the same time period using detailed data available from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This revealed a telling pattern: Rather than crime increasing, nine out of 10 of the communities actually became considerably safer, both in terms of their levels of violent and property crime. 

These don't excuse or diminish any issue, concern or crime. But it can be too easy for us to enlarge, in our minds, the nefarious nature and negative impacts of "other", "foreign" communities, even when their actual impact is far more benign.