A Demographic Lifeline? Immigration and Hispanic Population Growth in Rural America

Abstract

Can immigration save rural and small town America? Our goal is to highlight the new racial dynamics of population change in nonmetropolitan areas, where slowing population growth rates since 1990 eventuated in widespread depopulation during the post-2010 period. We use 3141 counties as the unit of analysis, tracking population change data over the 1990 to 2017 period. Our results, based on decennial census counts and population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, show that Hispanic population growth has been spatially ubiquitous, occurring in both declining and growing nonmetropolitan counties. Hispanic growth has slowed but not reversed chronic declines in rural population. Significantly, the growth of Latinos benefited a majority of historically depopulating or declining nonmetropolitan counties as well as nonmetropolitan counties that have continued to grow. Our analyses also reveal substantial heterogeneity in patterns of population change in nonmetropolitan America. Latino population growth often makes the difference between overall county population growth and decline. Nearly 200 nonmetropolitan counties grew during the 2010–2017 period, but only because Hispanic population increases offset non-Hispanic population declines. For these counties, which account for about 10 percent of all nonmetropolitan counties, Latinos clearly provided a demographic lifeline. Hispanics population gains were usually insufficient to reverse population declines in historically depopulating counties but nevertheless slowed the pace of decline. Hispanic growth was greatest in counties where the population was growing, resulting in a demographic multiplier effect.