IS HISPANIC POPULATION DISPERSION INTO RURAL COUNTIES CONTRIBUTING TO LOCAL ECONOMIC GROWTH

In the 1990s, rural counties in the United States, which had been losing population, became the destinations for an increasing number of Hispanics, slowing and in some cases reversing population declines. In this paper, we examine whether faster growth in the Hispanic population is linked to faster growth in income per capita in rural counties. Our results indicate strong support for the hypothesis that population growth caused by the increase in Hispanics, whether from international immigrants, migrants from within the United States, or from natural growth in families, has fueled increased economic growth in those small, rural communities whose populations had been in decline during the 1970s or the 1980s. (JEL J15, J61, R11) I. INTRODUCTION Historically, young Americans have been moving out of rural areas and small towns, leaving behind smaller and older populations. Consistent with this trend, in the 1970s and 1980s population shrank in non-metropolitan areas across the Great Plains in the Midwest, Appalachia in the East, and parts of the Old South. In the 1990s, the trend of declining population slowed and in some cases reversed in some non-metropolitan areas, largely as the result of growth in the Hispanic population into these rural areas (Johnson and Lichter 2008; Zuniga and Hernandez-Leon 2005). "The widespread geographic diffusion of Hispanics from immigrant gateways to newly emerging destinations is perhaps the most significant trend in U.S. population redistribution over the past quarter century" (Lichter and Johnson 2009, 497). As a front page article in USA Today hypothesized: "for declining counties, many in the Great Plains, the growth in young Hispanics may be the only way out of a population spiral" (EI Nasser 2008, 1). Hispanic population growth in rural areas is not only the result of immigration; Johnson and Lichter (2008) show that the growth in Hispanic populations in non-metropolitan areas is being driven as much by births to immigrant families as by immigrants themselves. Indeed, they conclude that "Hispanic population growth is self-sustaining, even if immigration were to be seriously curtailed through new restrictive legislation" (p. 342). Growth in Hispanic populations is, therefore, not only leading to population growth in some rural areas where population had been declining but also to changes in the age structure of the population in those areas--making it younger. These facts suggest that studies of the impact of population changes on local economies in non-metropolitan areas should not focus on the impact of immigrants alone, but should also include the impact of their growing families. New Faces in New Places: The Changing Geography of American Immigration: Zuniga and Hernandez-Leon (2005) documents these and other changes and points out that many of these new destinations may lack the fiscal and social resources to adequately assist the newcomers as they are integrated into the community. On the other hand, Liaw and Frey (2007, 378) suggest that: Small communities experiencing declining population and tax base as a consequence of the substantial out-migration of their working-age natives were revitalized or prevented from losing their local plants by the arrival of hardworking immigrants who were willing to accept practically any kind of job, including the cold, wet, repetitive, and injury-prone jobs in meat-processing plants where the low wages were nonetheless higher than farm wages and several times the wages in the immigrants' home countries. In other words, it is not clear whether the overwhelmingly Hispanic population growth in non-metropolitan and previously shrinking areas is, on balance, good or bad for rural America. Definitions of what is good or bad for rural America are obviously value-laden and contentious. In this paper, we focus on the simple issue of whether faster growth in the population caused by the influx of Hispanics is linked to faster growth in income per capita in rural counties. …