Carsey: Growing Racial Diversity in Rural America

The Carsey School of Public Policy (University of New Hampshire) has published a new brief by Kenneth Johnson and Daniel Lichter titled "Growing Racial Diversity in Rural America: Results from the 2020 Census."  Here's the abstract: 

Many rural areas have been hit hard over the past decade by globalization, a rapidly changing U.S. economy, job instability, and high unemployment. The net result has been migration losses and low fertility. As a result, only about a third of nonmetropolitan (rural) counties gained population between 2010 and 2020. The other two-thirds lost population. In some cases, the losses were modest, but nearly one in three rural counties have experienced chronic population decline. And, for the first time ever, rural America as a whole lost population between 2010 and 2020. Recent 2020 Census data revealed that nonmetropolitan counties declined by 288,000 people (or 0.6 percent) between 2010 and 2020, after growing by 3.4 percent during the previous decade. Today, there are 46 million rural residents, which is just 14 percent of the U.S. total. This is the smallest percentage of the population to reside in rural areas in U.S. history.

Though population declines were widespread, rural America became more racially and ethnically diverse over the past decade. Rural population decline occurred in tandem with growing rural diversity. As we show in this report, the growing diversity of the nonmetropolitan population reflects differential patterns of demographic change among the numerous racial and ethnic sub-groups in rural America.