There is a deepening sense of fear as population loss accelerates in rural America. The decline of small-town life is expected to be a looming topic in the presidential election.
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America’s rural population began contracting about a decade ago, according to statistics drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau.
A whopping 81 percent of rural counties had more deaths than births between 2019 and 2023, according to an analysis by a University of New Hampshire demographer. Experts who study the phenomena say the shrinking baby boomer population and younger residents having smaller families and moving elsewhere for jobs are fueling the trend.
According to a recent Agriculture Department estimate, the rural population did rebound by 0.25 percent from 2020 to 2022 as some families decamped from urban areas during the pandemic.
But demographers say they are still evaluating whether that trend will continue, and if so, where. Pennsylvania has been particularly afflicted. Job losses in the manufacturing and energy industries that began in the 1980s prompted many younger families to relocate to Sun Belt states. The relocations helped fuel population surges in places like Texas and Georgia. But here, two-thirds of the state’s 67 counties have experienced a drop in population in recent years.
There are still a lot of workers needed in agriculture, but increasingly they are either undocumented migrants or on restrictive visas (like temporary foreign workers in Canada) that limit their bargaining power and let their employers exploit them with poor working conditions and rock bottom wages. This means that these workers often don’t have the means or income to participate much in the local economy beyond the bare essentials. This is actually a case of “trickle down economics” where paying workers fair, living wages would lead to healthier local economies where these workers could spend those wages and support having or starting a family.