Nearly three-quarters of the population growth in rural counties came from people who moved to rural areas from foreign countries. Without those international immigrants, 58% of rural counties would have lost population in the last four years.
Nearly 300,000 people have immigrated from abroad to nonmetropolitan, or rural, counties since 2020, driving most of the growth in rural America during that time, according to a Daily Yonder analysis of new Census data.
Rural America has been growing in the years following the pandemic. But that came after a decade of population decline in rural America that followed the Great Recession.
Migration—both domestic and international—has driven all of that growth. That’s partly because rural America is experiencing a natural decrease, the term demographers use when deaths outnumber births. Over the past four years, rural counties had six deaths for every five births, resulting in a net loss of about 104,000 residents.
Nationwide, international immigration accounted for 84% of population growth over the past year; in rural areas, it made up 87%.
Demographer Kenneth Johnson, Ph.D, with the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire, said that immigration trends have varied significantly by economic industry over the past four years.
“There is not just one rural America,” Johnson told the Daily Yonder. “There’s really several rural Americas, and they’re all different from one another.”
In counties dependent on agriculture, immigration accounted for almost two-thirds of total population growth since 2020. These farming counties gained 42,600 residents, 27,000 of which were immigrants from abroad.
But even among rural farming communities there was variation between different regions. Unlike rural America at large, farming-dependent counties in the Midwest lost population between 2020 and 2024, although they gained about 9,400 new immigrants.
“There’s not enough domestic young people who would be willing to do these jobs,” said Johnson, referring to positions often filled by people with work visas.
These are counties that tend to rely on immigrants to keep their industries afloat, especially amid declining birth rates.
“And [in farming counties], immigration did play a fairly significant role in the minimal gain that they received,” Johnson said.
Between 2020 and 2024, Texas, North Carolina, and Iowa saw the highest numbers of immigrants in rural areas. Texas led with 26,000 rural immigrants, contributing to a 2.15% increase in its overall rural population.
North Carolina followed with 13,300 immigrants and a 2.23% rural population growth, while Iowa, despite welcoming 12,500 immigrants, experienced an overall rural population decline of 0.48%.
