On whether Trump's policies will hurt rural America and ultimately cost him rural support

Ronald Brownstein wrote yesterday in The Atlantic under the headline, "Trump Is About to Betray His Rural Supporters."  Of course, it's conceivable that the journalist is wrong--that Trump won't be bad for rural people and places.  That said, Brownstein does bring the receipts regarding specific policies on trade (as relates to agriculture), immigration, health care, and education.  Here's the key paragraph in that regard: 

Agricultural producers could face worse losses than any other economic sector from Trump’s plans to impose sweeping tariffs on imports and to undertakewhat he frequently has called “the largest domestic deportation operation” of undocumented immigrants “in American history.” Hospitals and other health providers in rural areas could face the greatest strain from proposals Trump has embraced to slash spending on Medicaid, which provides coverage to a greater share of adults in smaller communities than in large metropolitan areas. And small-town public schools would likely be destabilized even more than urban school districts if Trump succeeds in his pledge to expand “school choice” by providing parents with vouchers to send their kids to private schools.

Brownstein later unpacks and provides more information on each of these issues.  In addition, He provides data on how Trump's support from rural voters has grown with each of the three times he ran for president:  

Trump’s vote share in the nonmetro areas exceeded even his commanding 66 percent there against Joe Biden in 2020 and 67 percent against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Trump’s advantage in the small metros outstripped his margin over Biden and equaled his advantage over Clinton.

The story also includes data on other geographies, including small metropolitan areas [here citing The Daily Yonder]:  

In the second most-rural grouping, small metropolitan areas, Trump won 60 percent of the vote compared with Vice President Kamala Harris’s 40 percent. In the top most-rural category, nonmetropolitan areas, Trump beat Harris even more resoundingly, by 69 percent to 31 percent.

And the media can't get enough of Walz' links to rurality

Here are excerpts from a few recent stories about Walz' rural roots.  These excerpts are from from Matt Flegenheimer's story in the New York Times, "The Small-Town Nebraska Tim Walz Put Behind Him, but Never Fully Left":  

Within a few years, Mr. Walz’s father, a well-liked school administrator, got sick, then sicker. When he was gone, Mr. Walz’s mother found work where she could, and the family subsisted on Social Security survivor benefits.  

By then, Mr. Walz had joined the National Guard, two days after his 17th birthday. He has said he took his oath of enlistment from a lieutenant with a farm nearby, standing in the middle of a cornfield.

As Mr. Walz, the 60-year-old Minnesota governor, prepares this week to introduce himself to the nation from the party convention in Chicago, he and those close to him have positioned his rural Nebraska upbringing as essential to his self-conception, a skeleton key to understanding the man he became and the values he came to embrace.

His experiences in this period formed the core of his future political identity — unpretentious, neighborly, a little mischievous — even as he seemed determined, ultimately, to see what life might look like somewhere else.

Though Mr. Walz still speaks nostalgically of his time back home, he has remained tethered to the place mostly through those who stayed.

His mother still lives in Butte, Neb., a village of fewer than 300 people, where the lettering above the old high school reads simply, “High School,” and Mr. Walz’s cousins recounted his exploits from their regular perch at the corner bar, Corner Bar.

And here's a more recent Washington Post story by Abbie Cheeseman about how how Walz' old congressional district is divided across the rural-urban axis. I like the nuance in this story, which doesn't treat the whole congressional district as rural--like most stories have. Here are some key excerpts, beginning with the lede:

The political divide in the congressional district Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz once represented is now so stark that it’s hard to imagine one person representing the whole area. In this expanse of southern Minnesota, a few small, sleepy cities stand their ground in a sea of rural red that stretches from the South Dakota border to the bluffs above the Mississippi River. 

Democrats have expressed hope that putting Walz, a Midwesterner who grew up working summers on a Nebraska farm, on their ticket will help them win over rural voters. But a close look at Walz’s former district — a prime example of how America’s huge urban-rural cultural divide shapes the nation’s politics — shows just how difficult that task will be.

In the 18 years since Walz made the life-changing career change from high school teacher to politician, Minnesota has grown more liberal as a state, but the district that gave him his start has lost almost all of the blue precincts that once dotted its farmlands. The cities in the 1st Congressional District have grown, but in the expansive rural heartland (pigs outnumber residents of the district seven times over, according to 2022 census data), populations have decreased and the people remaining have grown more conservative.

Tales of Walz’s days as a teacher and high school football coach trip off the tongues of almost everyone in Mankato, the college town where he and his family lived, but mentions of Walz were widely met with a roll of the eyes this month at the Nicollet County Fair. Mankatoans feel energy and pride for their governor, but at the fair just 20 minutes outside town, some people were more excited by the prospect that if Walz becomes vice president, he might finally leave the state.

Mankato, with a population of 45,000 spread among three adjacent counties, is micropolitan--the upper end of metropolitan counties.  So, the story suggests that places the size of Mankato--typically thought of as rural--are more like larger cities in their political leanings.  It is probably significant, too, that Mankato is a college town, home of Minnesota State University.  

Youngkin nixes battery plant for rural southern Virginia, citing concerns over Chinese influence

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported a few days ago on "Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s decision to halt plans for a $3.5 billion Ford Motor Co. battery plant over his concerns about Chinese influence, [a decision that] cost one of the poorest areas of Virginia a reported 2,500 jobs with potential for more."  

A further excerpt follows, illustrating well the tension between the need for jobs in rural southern Virginia and concerns about Chinese influence: 

If Ford finalized the project, the plant would have gone in the Southern Virginia Mega Site at Berry Hill in Pittsylvania County, [population 60,501]. More than $200 million has been spent over 15 years to make Berry Hill a premier site and the largest publicly owned site in the Southeast. The plant would have built lithium iron phosphate batteries for Ford’s electric vehicles.

The location still has no tenant, however, after Youngkin intervened in late December to stop plans for the plant in Virginia because of its partnership with Chinese company Contemporary Amperex Technology. Youngkin first publicly discussed his decision after giving his State of the Commonwealth address on Wednesday.

Local officials said they could not comment on the situation because of a nondisclosure agreement, which is standard in such economic development projects. But Democratic state lawmakers slammed Youngkin, saying he put national politics in front of thousands of jobs in Southside Virginia. (Youngkin is considering a run for president in 2024.)

Senator Ghazala Hashmi, D-Chesterfield, wrote in an email earlier this week:  

During his campaign, the Governor made a promise to bring economic development and manufacturing jobs to our communities that are struggling — especially in rural Virginia — to attract industries that offer competitive wages.  The Governor’s decision to pull Virginia out of the competition for the new Ford facility puts the Commonwealth at a severe disadvantage.

Here's more on Berry Hill:  

The roughly 3,500-acre megasite at Berry Hill is owned by the Danville-Pittsylvania Regional Industrial Facility Authority, a joint entity involving both Danville and Pittsylvania County.

City and county officials hope to attract major industries that would bring thousands of jobs to the site. They are hoping to land a large deal that would transform the economic fabric of the area, which has lost its furniture, textiles and tobacco industries and is focused on advanced manufacturing.

Legal Scholarship: "Can Micropolitan Areas Bridge the Rural-Urban Divide?"

Sheila Foster and Clayton Gillette recently posted this article on ssrn.com.  The abstract follows: 

There exists a well-known and significant divide between urban and rural areas in the United States. The divide has been documented along multiple dimensions – social, economic, and political – and is seen as a detrimental characteristic of our national identity and capacity for both economic development and civil political discourse. In this Article, we explore a subset of the urban/rural divide and propose a mechanism for reducing its economic and political effects within that limited realm. Specifically, we focus on the subset of rural areas that lie within what the Office of Management and Budget defines as micropolitan areas. Micropolitan areas are characterized by an urban area with a population between 10,000 and 50,000, and adjacent rural counties. Data suggest that rural areas within micropolitan regions do better economically than rural areas unconnected to urban areas, though not as well as the principal city within the micropolitan area. If the objective is to reduce the economic, and perhaps the political divide between urban and rural areas, then micropolitan areas may represent low-hanging fruit for redress.

This Article argues that micropolitan areas are an important window into understanding the relationship between urban and rural economies, explores the characteristics of those areas that are likely to generate economic success and recommends policies that would capture those benefits. Additionally, we speculate that increased opportunities for economic interaction between the urban and rural parts of micropolitan areas could also address the political aspects of the urban-rural divide. Recognizing the complexity of the relationship between urban and rural economies, we identify various obstacles to realizing the kinds of interlocal cooperation that we believe are necessary to reduce the economic and political divide within micropolitan areas. We conclude with suggestions for a research agenda to remedy the underdeveloped study of micropolitan areas.

Coronavirus in rural America (Part CXLII): New York Times feature on north central Arkansas hot spot hits close to home

The Sharon LaFraniere story is dateline Mountain Home, Arkansas, and the headline is, "In Undervaccinated Arkansas, Covid Upends Life All Over Again." Here's an excerpt: 

While much of the nation tiptoes toward normalcy, the coronavirus is again swamping hospitals in places like Mountain Home, a city of fewer than 13,000 people not far from the Missouri border. A principal reason, health officials say, is the emergence of the new, far more contagious variant called Delta, which now accounts for more than half of new infections in the United States.

The variant has highlighted a new divide in America, between communities with high vaccination rates, where it causes hardly a ripple, and those like Mountain Home that are undervaccinated, where it threatens to upend life all over again.

In Baxter County, where the hospital is, fewer than a third of residents are fully vaccinated — below both the state and the national averages. Even fewer people are protected in surrounding counties that the hospital serves.

“It’s absolutely flooded,” said Dr. Rebecca Martin, a pulmonologist, as she made the rounds of 2 West one morning last week.

I wrote this last week about what was happening COVID-wise in the region.  Here's a New York Times health care story about Baxter County from 2017, focused on the regional hospital as an economic engine for the area, which has attracted many retirees and better qualified doctors than one associates with rural regions.  Journalist Patricia Cohen also notes in her feature that Baxter County is Trump country.  

Postscript:  A few weeks later, the Wall Street Journal ran this feature about coronavirus impacts in Greenwood, Arkansas, part of the Forth Smith Metro Area in the west central part of the state.  

New OMB metropolitan designation proposal could harm micropolitan and rural areas

The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is considering a new proposal that would redefine the population threshold for metropolitan areas. Today, cities with 50,000 residents or more qualify as metropolitan areas. Under the new definition, cities must have 100,000 residents in order to be classified as metropolitan. This proposal would downgrade 144 municipalities from metropolitan to micropolitan areas, including: Auburn, Alabama; Joplin, Missouri; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Bismarck, North Dakota; and Morristown, Tennessee.

Measured another way, this proposal would also affect county designations. The Daily Yonder map below highlights 255 metropolitan counties that would now be considered non-metropolitan, “enlarging non-metropolitan American by 18 million residents.”

Some statisticians say the change was bound to happen because of increased urbanization and overall population growth. Although the OMB’s definition of metropolitan has evolved, including changes to factor in suburban sprawl, the 50,000 population number has not been altered since 1950. 

However, for many communities this change is not just an innocuous administrative update. As law professor Amanda L. Kool says, “these definitions have real-world consequences that go beyond my irritation when someone . . . map-splains my town.” Kool lives in a town of 8,000 that is classified as part of the Cincinnati metropolitan area due to “commuting patterns.”

The foremost concern for cities facing the micropolitan downgrade is funding. Although the OMB states its definitions are not for “nonstatistical activities or for use in program funding formulas,” there are some federal programs that depend on these designations. For example, Niles, Michigan, received a $278,000 Community Development Block Grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which the city used for a “park clean-up, a summer camp for children from low-income households, a school resource officer’s salary, [and] homeless services and code enforcement,” according to the South Bend Tribune. In addition, a representative from Hinesville, Georgia’s metropolitan planning organization opposes the proposal because some state transportation improvement programs are tied to federal designations used by the Department of Transportation. 

Many rural communities also strongly oppose this change because they worry it will increase competition for rural-specific funding. Fred Ullrich with the Rural Policy Research Institute (RUPRI) Center for Rural Health Policy Analysis told Daily Yonder: 

We’ve introduced this really bizarre imbalance now, because now I have nonmetropolitan counties with [urban areas of] 95,000 people in them and they’re competing for the same bit of pie that the nonmetropolitan county with 5,000 people.

Jerry Merrill, the mayor of Rexburg, Idaho (population 29,000 in non-metro Madison County) expressed a similar concern in his comment to the OMB. He notes the proposal will “make it harder for Idaho communities to access the federal funds necessary to pay for the education, transportation, sewer systems, sidewalks and social services."

Consequently, the new classification scheme reduces competition for metro-specific federal funds. This favors urbanized areas, like the Miami-Dade Transportation Planning Organization, which unsurprisingly says full steam ahead with the new metro designation proposal.

Aside from funding concerns, some experts are concerned this designation may obscure or inflate statistical data about rural communities used by policymakers and businesses. According to Tony Glover at the Wyoming Department of Workforce Services: 

Data users of all kinds often request localized data, and this proposal will negatively affect them. Small, predominantly rural states like Wyoming need all the data they can get, and this proposal does not serve them well.

Glover’s comment illustrates an overarching problem: obtaining good statistics about rural places. A prior post on this blog discussed this challenge in the context of the 2020 Census. Without good data, it is difficult to enact sound policy solutions. 

The OMB is accepting comments until Friday, March 19 on this matter. While it will be difficult to predict and measure the full impact of this proposal, hopefully this comment period at least provides a better sense of all the stakeholders. 

On top of this critical issue about population designations, the OMB also faces a political problem as it is currently without a leader. President Biden’s nominee, Neera Tanden, withdrew after it became clear she was unlikely to be confirmed by the Senate. 

One name under consideration for the top spot is Shalanda Young, who is a native of Clinton, Louisiana, a town of 2,000 located 40 miles away from Baton Rouge on the fringe of the metropolitan area. Young’s hometown is situated similarly to Professor Kool’s, and it may be interesting to see her response to this metropolitan designation question.

Update on Mar. 22: The Brookings Institution recently published a preliminary analysis of the OMB proposal. The report concluded that new non-metro counties would be more prosperous and have lower poverty rates than the old non-metro counties, indicating that the realignment potentially masks distressed communities. 

Another rural item in the NYT, this time from David Brooks

Brooks' column on March 21 was titled "What Rural America Has to Teach Us," and it's the fourth big rural "piece" in the New York Times in recent days.  

For the most part, the column is rosy and nostalgic, as Brooks tends to be when talking about this milieu, about people who go to church.  He mostly uses the small cities of McCook (population 7,698) and Grand Island, Nebraska (48,520), to illustrate his points about community, trust, low-crime, church going, and the sort of lack of anonymity that is beneficial to kids.  Here's an excerpt that gets at many of those themes, again with Nebraska held up as the poster child for the concept of "weaving" that Brooks is touting these days.  In short, people in McCook make time for civic life, with many wearing "multiple hats."  People also work (low-unemployment), go to church and stay married.  (Some) schools have very high graduation rates, and the state has the 12th longest life expectancy in the nation.   

Here's an excerpt from the piece in which Brooks muses about the "why":  Why are these Nebraskans so community minded?  

Farm life inculcates an insane work ethic, which gets carried into community life. The weavers are deeply rooted in place. Many said their main goal in life is to make their small town better at their death than it was at their birth. 

There are also 93 counties in Nebraska, several with populations below 1,000. That means there are a ton of local government functions and not that many people to fill them, so everybody has to chip in. 

The word I heard most was “intentionality” — especially about community.

As for that intentionality, among other things it means supporting local businesses rather than shopping on amazon.com.  

And to be fair, Brooks is not a complete pollyanna about rural America.  He does acknowledge that not everything is rosy, specifically poverty (as reflected, for example, in the rate of children who receive free- and reduced-price lunches), the struggle for self-reliance (at least the appearance of it), and the challenge of authentic racial/ethnic integration where some places have LatinX populations as high as 30%.   

"Small Towns Now Bear the Brunt" of Harvey

That's part of a headline from today's New York Times, which includes this line (see bold, which reflects my emphasis), which sums up so much about rural America and service delivery:

But as Houston, the urban behemoth that has so far been the focal point in the unfolding drama of Hurricane Harvey, began gingerly to assess the devastation, the storm marched on to conquer a vast new swath speckled with small towns that are home to millions of people who were shocked anew by Harvey’s tenaciously destructive power. Officials faced a population in dire need, but far more difficult to reach.

The story quotes a FEMA official as saying,

There are a lot of places that are not accessible by car or truck or boat, and we need to get to the survivors to get them critical aid.  

The story, dateline Newton, Texas (population 2,478 and therefore barely rural by the U.S. Census Bureau definition), reports several anecdotes from different "small towns," including from Batson, Moss Hill, Bon Weir, Aransas Pass, Port Aransas, Ingleside and Rockport. Of course, it treats towns like Port Arthur, population 55,000, as "small," which would not necessarily meet my definition, but you get the idea. In fact, the story mentions that the 50 counties affected by the flood include more than 300 towns and "small cities."
Here's a quote from a resident of Moss Hill:

Ms. Price said she knew how widespread the storm’s toll was, and she knew that in the past rural areas like this one did not always get the most immediate aid. 

“We’re not forgotten,” she said. “It just takes them a little longer to get to us.” 

Rural residents insisted that they were used to being far from outside help and that self-reliance and an ethos of neighbors helping neighbors came with the territory.

This story from earlier in the storm centered on hard-hit Rockport, population 8,766, in Aransas County.  It featured this lede, which in turn featured a very colorful 16-year-old character:

In the days since Hurricane Harvey slammed into his hometown, Colin McBurney has become his own first-responder – a 16-year-old in a backward baseball cap with bare feet, a pistol and a truck. He drove to the houses of his neighbors all weekend, checking on the people no one had heard from. 

One friend made the kind of request people make in this bay town of nearly 11,000 whose spirit is equal parts fishing village, millionaire’s retreat and working-class country – please get the horse.

This story yesterday was more about events (rescues, to be precise) in Houston and its burbs, but it included this line that struck me as reminiscent of rural as much as of working class (again, see bold for my emphasis):

The volunteer rescue boat and many others like it are a sign of how the response to one of the worst disasters in decades in Texas has been, in many ways, improvised. Recreational vehicles — airboats, Jet Skis, motorized fishing boats — have rushed to the aid of people trapped in their homes, steered by welders, roofers, mechanics and fishermen wearing shorts, headlamps and ponchos. The working class, in large part, is being saved by the working class.

Indeed, the little crew of men Manny Fernandez featured in this story had driven to Houston from Lufkin, Texas, population 35,000, once they saw the need.  Lufkin is 120 miles northeast of Houston, in "deep East" Texas.        

On abortion as "a free trip to the city" ... and having the last word

Last week, Alaska state representative David Eastman of Wasilla (a suburb of Anchorage, home of Sarah Palin), commented that some women "try to get pregnant to get a 'free trip to the city' for abortions."  He said this in the context of legislative debate about "abortions being covered by state funds and Medicaid."  Interesting because I'm not aware of any federal funds, which would include Medicaid, being available for abortion, as dictated by the Hyde Amendment.  In Alaska, however, state funds are apparently available, as this additional detail from the AP report explains.

The Alaska Supreme Court has held that the state must fund medically necessary abortions if it funds medically necessary services for others with financial needs.

How progressive of that high court.  This reminds me of one of the most knuckle-headed things a judge ever said about abortion access.

A woman in Alaska, for example, could be required to travel 800 miles to get to an abortion clinic merely because she lives in one place and the nearest abortion clinic is on the other side of the state. But that certainly doesn’t constitute anything even approaching an undue burden.

Interestingly, the judge who said this was Dee Benson (now a senior judge), and the case was Utah Women's Clinic v. Leavitt, 844 F. Supp. 1482 (D. Utah 1994) (discussed here).  Why the Utah judge thought it appropriate or necessary to use an example from Alaska is beyond me, but maybe he was looking for the most extreme example of distance he could find.  Given that Alaska is the largest state in terms of land area, Judge Benson necessarily turned to "The Last Frontier." In light of that point, it is perhaps significant that the second largest state, Texas, became the subject of the latest round of litigation over abortion restrictions, and that distance ultimately loomed so large in relation to the Supreme Court's assessment of the undue burden standard. Read more here and here.   

Speaking of distance and undue burdens also reminds me of a recent exchange between Prof. Carol Sanger of  Columbia Law and me regarding abortion and the significance of spatiality/geography/rurality regarding abortion access.  This is, of course, a topic I've been writing about for nearly a decade.  In the end, Sanger agrees that my plea for attention to rural women should be "the last word" in the exchange over Sanger's new book, About Abortion:  Terminating Pregnancy in the 21st Century, which says very little about the geography issue  (Sanger's "last word" phrasing is especially pleasing to me because my mother's nickname for me was "last word Lisa," an identity that may well have put me on the path to law school).

Sanger also includes some really interesting data on military women, who don't choose to be "rural," but who are assigned to bases in nonmetropolitan (or small metropolitan) places without ready access to abortion.  Sanger writes:

An amici brief,filed in Whole Woman’s Health on behalf of the Service Service Women’s Action Network And Retired Or Former Military Officers, explained that “the entire western half of the [Texas], covering over 130,000 square miles—in which five large military bases are located—would lack any abortion care providers at all.” If HB2 had remained in effect, the brief noted that service women at Goodfellow Air Force Base [San Angelo] would have a three hour drive to San Antonio, 199 miles away, and this is without the added difficulties of obtaining a pass, arranging a timely appointment, and finding the funds.

It's a sub-issue I had not not thought about amidst the many pages of my writing about spatiality in relation to abortion access.  But then I don't tend to think of military bases as "rural," located as they often are in small cities, in smaller metropolitan areas.  But when we look at what happened under Texas H.B. 2, women in places like Killeen (population about 150K)/Fort Hood certainly suffered serious detriments.  The sole abortion provider in Killeen closed after the Texas H.B. 2 admitting privileges requirement went into effect, a few months after the law's passage in 2013.  That closure left women on that massive Army base--the largest in the world in land area--forced to travel to either Austin or Dallas for abortion services.

But let me return to the issues raised by Eastman in Alaska, which are less about the burden of distance--which the state of Alaska has pragmatically taken care of--and more about the character of women.  The AP story, by Becky Bohrer, includes more helpful background for us on abortion availability in Alaska and--for late-term abortions--in Seattle, Washington.

First, here is more of what Eastman said:

We have folks who try to get pregnant in this state so that they can get a free trip to the city, and we have folks who want to carry their baby past the point of being able to have an abortion in this state so that they can have a free trip to Seattle.

Then Bohrer tells us more about the furor Eastman's comments have generated:

Eastman, who is a member of the House minority, made similar comments to another media outlet later.

In a speech on the House floor Friday, Democratic Rep. Neal Foster of Nome said Eastman’s comments were unacceptable and said he hoped Eastman would apologize.

“It shocks the conscience to think that a female in a village would want to endure the physical and the emotional pain of getting an abortion just so that they could get a free trip to Anchorage,” Foster said.

Most of the women who live in villages that Foster represents are Alaska Native and feel Eastman’s comments were directed toward them, Foster said. Many Alaska communities are not connected to a road system and smaller communities often have limited health services that necessitate travel to larger communities for care.

When asked if he felt he had anything he need to apologize for, Eastman said he would be glad to speak with Foster and “understand exactly what he’s getting at.”

Following the floor session, the House majority caucus distributed a letter to Eastman signed by Foster, House Speaker Bryce Edgmon and two other rural lawmakers, demanding a public apology. Rep. Geran Tarr, an Anchorage Democrat, said she may seek a motion to censure Eastman. She called Eastman’s comments “deeply offensive, racist in nature and misogynistic.”

Great to see other state legislators standing up for Alaska Natives and other rural populations.  That is encouraging.  And it also brings me to the really outrageous part of what Eastman said--that women might purposefully get pregnant so that they can have a day out on the town, a freebie trip to a place where they can get an abortion ... and then tie on some shopping or a fancy meal, maybe even a jaunt up the Space Needle.

This brings me back to Sanger's over-arching point in her new book:  women take abortion seriously--and we should presume they can make good decisions about it for themselves.  We should therefore not presume--as Eastman suggests--that they will get pregnant willy-nilly to "earn" a frolic in the city.  Insulting, misogynist and racist, indeed.

Chobani and Clif Bar have micropolitan south central Idaho humming

I visited Idaho's Magic Valley in 2011 on a field trip with the Rural Sociological Society's (RSS) Annual Meeting in Boise, so it was with particular interest that I read Kirk Johnson's story about Twin Falls in the New York Times this week.  Johnson reported a few days ago--in a front-page story--under the headline, "What Decline? A Rural Hub Thrives in Idaho."  In a related story, Johnson offered a more personal reminiscence of his path to report this feature on Twin Falls, from the vantage point of his own upbringing in Utah, not far to the south.

Sadly, I never got a blog post written about my RSS field trip to the Magic Valley, memorable though it was.  I did, however, upload a few of my photos for this post in the run up the RSS Annual Meeting the following year.  One of the reasons I never got a blog post written is that what I saw and heard was so controversial.  Among other things, the "family" dairy we visited (family owned, but an industrial-sized operation)--across the river from Twin Falls in Jerome--was using immigrant labor in a way that seemed, well, exploitative.  The owner of the dairy talked about "her Mexicans" and how the dairy needed them in order to keep U.S. dairy products affordable, to prevent China from becoming the source of all of our nation's milk.  The owner also told us that local white workers were unreliable but that the occasional refugee resettled to the area worked out, too; she referred in particular to a Burmese refugee working at the dairy who had proved himself hard working, reliable and competent.  Mostly, however, she lauded "her" Latinx workers as critical to her business's sustainability.  After that visit to the dairy, our group went into Twin Falls where we had lunch at a "Mexican" restaurant and where a local priest talked to us about immigration and refugee resettlement into the region.  We were also made aware of the Idaho dairy industry's push for immigration reform, especially from many in this region whose economic livelihoods were reliant on immigrant labor.  (See a related, recent story here, about Wisconsin dairies).

Johnson's story is providing an update on what has happened since I visited nearly six years ago--and the news is good.  In recent years Chobani Yogurt (2013) and Clif Bar (2015) have established manufacturing facilities in Twin Falls.  These economic splashes are among factors that have the nine-country area in south-central Idaho booming.  Both pay workers$15/hour, more than twice the state's minimum wage of $7.25.  In short, with this story Johnson is offering a contrary narrative to the dominant rural narrative--so often featured on this blog--of decline, population loss, sagging economies.  (See just one example here).

Johnson puts Twin Falls' growth in national perspective: Between 2000 and 2015, the population of Twin Falls County increased by 25%, twice as fast as the national rate.

Twin Falls, population 47,000, is a place where rows of hay and feed corn brush right up against the edge of town, but it’s also the biggest community for a hundred miles in any direction, which makes it a shopping hub. Five new hotels have opened since the end of the recession, and more than 80,000 people a day drive in to work or shop.

This is consistent with what I wrote in this recent post--about the efficiency of regional services and retail consolidation, even (or especially) amidst a largely rural region with numerous smallish towns. Indeed, Johnson writes,

In its heady growth spurt, Twin Falls is sucking the oxygen from some smaller, struggling communities farther out in the country as retailers and restaurants cluster in the center.

Johnson also speculates about the "why"--why Twin Falls is growing while many nonmetropolitan places are not (though he notes that northern Idaho and Bend, Oregon are other communities in the "rural" West that are similarly booming, for different reasons):

What went right in southern Idaho started and ended with the rich volcanic soil. With irrigation, the black dirt was splendid for growing crops, from potatoes to alfalfa, that in turn fed the dairy cows that grew up in what became known as the Magic Valley.

Idaho, Johnson reports, is the 4th largest milk producing state in the nation, following California, Wisconsin and New York.  Further 75% of that milk production is within 75 miles of Twin Falls.  That's what drew Chobani, which each day purchases up to 60 tanker trucks of milk (8000 gallons each) from area dairies.

But Johnson also gives "culture" its due in regard to Twin Falls' ascendancy:

[A]bove all else, city leaders, business owners and residents say, it’s a practical place, where the old small-town values of hardball competition shape political life. If an idea gets in the way of economic growth, it should be discarded.

He quotes the Twin Falls City Manager, Travis P. Rothweiler:

Economic development is a blood sport, and I mean that in every single way you can think of it.

And this brings me to Johnson's more personal reflections, given his familiarity with the region:

I was not prepared for Zumba classes and personal trainers at the Clif Bar company gym in Twin Falls, in the still new building the company opened last fall. It was not just jobs and economics that were changing, I immediately saw, but culture. Companies like Clif Bar, based in California and steeped in the outdoor identity of biking and health, and Chobani ... were also changing the nature of a job for their Twin Falls employees, and for workers at other companies that were being forced, through competition, to up their pay and benefits.

* * *

In reporting there on the ground, I then also saw that the old frozen-in-place southern Idaho was defrosting fast, with strains and stresses along the way.

Both of these stories are well worth reading in their entirety.  

The rural vote in the 2016 US Presidential election

Diamond Springs (El Dorado Co.), California, exurban Sacramento Nov. 2016
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt

After a seven-week hiatus from the blog, I'm depressed to be returning with this topic:  How rural America veered even more sharply Republican in 2016 than in recent past presidential elections.  Indeed, to be more blunt, I'm writing about how much of rural "white" America helped make Donald Trump president-elect.  It's been nearly a week since the election, and here's what the pundits and analysts are telling us about the rural vote.

Let me start with the Daily Yonder, which by Thursday had posted this.  The take away from Bill Bishop and Tim Marema's piece:

Donald Trump won the presidency with a surge of votes from rural counties, small towns, and medium sized cities. Democrat Hillary Clinton’s vote outside the nation’s largest metropolitan areas dropped precipitously from Democratic returns in 2012.

The data graphs accompanying the story indicate that Obama got 37.7% of rural voters in 2012, while Clinton got just 29.4% in 2016.  As for micropolitan areas (small cities), Obama got 40.5% to Hillary's 33%.

Democrats saw big declines in their percentage of the vote outside the cities. (See chart.) Republican Trump, meanwhile, had a nearly 7.3 million vote deficit in metropolitan areas almost erased by totals in rural counties and counties with towns under 50,000 people.

The Yonder story quotes Prof. James Gimpel, a political scientist at the University of Maryland:

From a geographic standpoint, the Trump-Clinton contest was more polarizing than Romney-Obama, with bigger gaps separating the most urban from the most rural locations.  

Interestingly, some of the earliest analysis of the rural vote and its import for the 2016 presidential race came out of Australia.  The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Catherine Hanrahan focused on three Rust Belt states where Trump garnered relatively narrow victories:  Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.  Hillary Clinton's losses there--by a total of just about 110,000 votes--were fatal to her bid for the presidency.  The story was similar in all three states.  Clinton won the big cities, and Trump carried small cities and rural areas.  Here's what Hanrahan wrote about Pennsylvania, which mirrors what she wrote about the other states; only the numbers were different.

Once again, Mrs Clinton easily outpolled Mr Trump in the cities, by more than 215,000 votes. 

But in the regional towns and cities away from the metropolitan areas, Mr Trump polled around 270,000 more votes than his opponent, enough to secure victory. 

The extra 3,000 votes he polled from country voters only extended his lead in the State.

One widely-read story about the "why" of all this is the Jeff Guo (Washington Post) interview with University of Wisconsin political scientist, Kathy Cramer, who earlier this year published The Politics of Resentment:  Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.  Cramer explains that rural voters are alienated from urban populations.  A particular aspect of this resentment is against highly educated elites, perceived by rural voters as know-it-alls who want to dictate to rural folks how to live.  Here are some of the key observations:  

[Cramer] shows how politics have increasingly become a matter of personal identity. Just about all of her subjects felt a deep sense of bitterness toward elites and city dwellers; just about all of them felt tread on, disrespected and cheated out of what they felt they deserved.

Cramer argues that this “rural consciousness” is key to understanding which political arguments ring true to her subjects. For instance, she says, most rural Wisconsinites supported the tea party's quest to shrink government not out of any belief in the virtues of small government but because they did not trust the government to help “people like them.”

She continues:

Listening in on these conversations, it is hard to conclude that the people I studied believe what they do because they have been hoodwinked. Their views are rooted in identities and values, as well as in economic perceptions; and these things are all intertwined.

The New York Times Upshot also focused on the Midwest, noting that counties that swing most dramatically toward Donald Trump--by 15 points or more between 2012 and 2016--were in that region.  Emily Badger, Quoctrung Bui, and Adam Pearce write:

That abrupt shift was probably driven by numerous factors that are hard to untangle: weak economic prospects; Mrs. Clinton’s lack of attention to those places on the campaign trail; Mr. Trump’s xenophobic message to voters anxious about change.

But the widening political divergence between cities and small-town America also reflects a growing alienation between the two groups, and a sense — perhaps accurate — that their fates are not connected.

As the authors of the Upshot piece note, most of the change occurred outside major metropolitan areas, with more than 1800 counties moving at least 15 points away from Clinton, while only 15 counties "tilted by more than five percentage points" in her favor, compared to 2012.

The Economist got in on the analysis action with this short piece, "A Country Divided by Counties".   It concludes with this sober thought:

American politics appear to be realigning along a cleavage between inward-looking countryfolk and urban globalists. Mr Trump hails from the latter group, but his message resounded with the former. A uniquely divisive candidate, he is both perhaps the least likely politician in the country to build bridges across that gap and also the only one who has the capacity to do so.

Just thinking of the British perspective on the election is a reminder of Brexit and the rural-urban divide on that vote.  Read more here.

The New York Review of Books did a lengthy post-mortem on the election over the week-end, and it included some rural-urban analysis.  In particular, the piece by Elizabeth Drew includes references to David Wasserman's Cracker Barrel index.  That is, Wasserman, of the Cook Political Report, uses counties that have a Cracker Barrel Old Country Store (n=493) as a proxy for the rural vote and those with Whole Food stores (n=184) as proxies for the urban vote.

 In 2012 Obama carried 75 percent of the counties that had a Whole Foods and 29 percent of the counties with a Cracker Barrel. But that spread was exceeded this year—in the other direction—with Trump winning 76 percent of counties with Cracker Barrel stores and just 22 percent of counties with Whole Foods.

Drew also quotes J.D. Vance, author of the best-selling Hillbilly Elegy and a widely quoted pundit on the white working class during this election season.  Vance weighs in on the cultural issues, some of which align along the rural-urban axis:

People who are drawn to Trump are drawn to him because he’s a little outrageous, he’s a little relatable, and fundamentally he is angry and spiteful and critical of the things that people feel anger and spite toward. ... It’s people who are perceived to be powerful. It’s the Hillary Clintons of the world, the Barack Obamas of the world, the Wall Street executives of the world. There just isn’t anyone out there who will talk about the system like it’s completely rigged like Donald Trump does. It’s certainly not something you’re going to hear from Hillary Clinton.

Note the similarities to Cramer's thesis.  Anger is central.  Differences in education matter--as does the perceived elitism--the disdain for rural and working class folk--of the narrating classes.  (I wrote about these issues, too, in my 2011 post-mortem on the 2008 election, The Geography of the Class Culture Wars). There I documented media depictions of rural people and places in the 2008 election cycle.  I also suggested that rurality has become a feature of identity for rural dwellers--a notion Kathy Cramer's work also confirms.

Of course, the rural-urban divide was played up explicitly and dramatically in the 2008 election cycle because Sarah Palin took up the mantle of Main Street and foisted that of Wall Street onto uber urban Obama.  The rural-urban divide wasn't so prominent in the 2016 election cycle rhetoric, but clearly the undercurrent of difference--and rural discontent--is alive and well.

One of the best pieces I read on the rural-urban divide in the United States before last week's vote was this one, by Colorado Public Radio, which I blogged about here.  It compared rural Rocky Ford with metropolitan Denver.

Meanwhile, back in California, I note that while Hillary Clinton carried the state handily, she lost in a number of nonmetropolitan counties, including those associated with the State of Jefferson in the far northern reaches.  (Read earlier blog posts about the State of Jefferson here and here).  The only coastal county that Trump carried was Del Norte, on the Oregon border, but he also prevailed by large margins in Siskiyou, Trinity, Modoc, Shasta, Lassen, Plumas, Sierra, Amador, Calaveras, Tehama, Yuba, Glenn, Colusa, Sutter, Tuolumne, Mariposa, Madera, Kings and Inyo counties.  Trump also carried several largish metropolitan counties:  El Dorado, Placer, Kern, Stanislaus, and Butte. Defying the clustering, Mono and Alpine counties--with their tiny Sierra-Nevada populations--went for Hillary Clinton.

Shifting away from the self-declared focus on rural and low-income folks for a moment, it is also telling that Trump carried Placer County--an affluent urban/exurban county north and northeast of Sacramento.  Levels of education and income are high in the Roseville and Rocklin areas.  So, much as a great deal of news analysis is of the enigmatic rural and working class voters, exit polls (usual caveats apply) indicate that the income bracket from which Trump drew the greatest level of support was $50K-$99K.  For those in income brackets above $99K, Trump beat Hillary in every income bracket with far greater margins than he enjoyed from those in income brackets below $50K.  

Transportation, work, and poverty in rural America

See this story on NPR today about the problems that keep poor people from breaking the cycle of poverty.   The headline is "One Family's Story Shows How the Cycle of Poverty is Hard to Break," and the dateline is Bath, New York, population 12,097, in nonmetropolitan (but micropolitan) Steuben County, population 98,650, in the western part of the state.  Pam Fessler's report paints a fairly detailed portrait of Desiree Metcalf, 24, a single mom to three young children.  Metcalf admits she's made some bad decisions, but she has also had some tough breaks--including an unstable childhood.   

Fessler reports that Metcalf recently trained as a nursing assistant but then lost her job because of lack of transportation.  It's not an uncommon issue for rural residents--especially rural women who are more economically precarious.  Fessler reports it this way:  

But she ran into a problem faced by many low-income workers: transportation. Her car was recently totaled by someone backing out of a driveway. 

"So now my vehicle is gone and [I] have no way to get back and forth to work reliably, and unfortunately, there's not much in this town as of work," she says. 

Mass transit is virtually nonexistent in this rural area.

I have written about lack of transportation for poor, rural residents here, here, here and here.   Fessler reported earlier this week from Painted Post, New York, population 1,782, under the headline, "The Changing Picture of Poverty:  Hard Work is 'Just Not Enough.'"  That story touched on the tough job market in the region in an era of rural restructuring, quoting Marsha Patrick, who runs the local HeadStart program:

Her program is trying to break the cycle [of poverty]. But Patrick says it's difficult, especially with factory jobs that used to support a middle class in this region disappearing in droves. 

"Unless we have those jobs to offer those folks, that they're going to feel good about and want to go to work for and do, the kids are going to be the ones who are suffering, and we're seeing it," she says.

The poverty rate in Steuben County is 15.1%.

Frontier justice thrives in Oregon, in the face of law enforcement budget cuts

Micropolitan Josephine County, Oregon, population 82,713, is experiencing a fiscal crisis that has devastated, among other things, the county's law enforcement and jail budgets.  NPR reported on the matter a few months ago here, leading to this blog post.  Now, Kirk Johnson reports for the New York Times today from Josephine County under the headline, "In Oregon, A Demand for Safety, but Not on Their Dime."

Johnson's report starts in the county seat, Grants Pass, population 34,800, where burglaries up last year nearly 70%, theft cases up about 80%.   Many attribute the crime surge to the "awareness by criminals that their actions are increasingly without consequences in [the] cash-starved Josephine County, where the jail the city depends on is mostly closed for lack of money."  Johnson quotes Sgt. Todd Moran of the Grants Pass Police, "It's just broken," referring to the need for more money for the county's criminal justice infrastructure, including prosecutors.

Then Johnson goes an hour south of Grants Pass, to a more rural part of the county, where a group of volunteers who call themselves Citizens Against Crime have been patrolling "the back roads of the county," since last summer, when the sheriff's office budget and staff were gutted.  For the fiscal year that started July 1, the Josephine County Sheriff's Office is down to one deputy to respond to general calls from the rest of the county.  Just a few years ago, the Office employed 22 deputies.  Meanwhile, applications to carry a concealed weapon were up 49% last year.

Among those carrying weapons are Sam Nichols and Glenn Woodbury who are among the volunteers with Citizens Against Crime, believe the county's "financial troubles are in fact strengthening the community and that citizen crime patrols like theirs are proving that money — meaning higher taxes — is not the solution." They say that with local residents on watch, crime rates have fallen to near zero.  

This particular line from Johnson's story suggests the rural or quasi-rural nature of the area where Nichols and Woodbury patrol: "... Woodbury in the passenger seat shining a spotlight into the woods and winding dark driveways."  

Referencing the ongoing national debate over crime, taxes, and--more recently--how the Trayvon Martin case causes us to inquire about the taking of law into the hands of private citizens, Johnson observes that the debate in places like Josephine County "goes much deeper, to the question of what government is for and how community is to be defined."  That's Johnson's segue into the economic disaster that is Josephine County and just how great the struggle is for many folks:  

At grocery stores in Grants Pass, stopping and citing shoplifters — sometimes with whole carts of beer or food in tow — have become part of the daily law enforcement routine. 

“I hold my breath, every day, for everything,” said Sheriff Gil Gilbertson.

Wow.

Johnson then goes into a detailed history of why Josephine County is in this fiscal pickle, which implicates the federal government, federally held lands, and whether and how much timber revenue feds share with local governments. Oh, and it also implicates residents' willingness or lack thereof to tax themselves.  County residents have voted multiple times, most recently in May, against raising their property taxes to help reduce the county's shortfall.  Johnson quotes rural economist Bruce Weber of Oregon State, who calls what is happening in Josephine County "a slow-motion disaster."  The full story is well worth a read for its balanced depiction and lucid and compassionate explanation.

Here's a related post from a few years ago, and a related story out of Coos County, which is contiguous to Josephine County.

Town seeks to leverage Marcellus Shale boom

John Schwartz reports in today's New York Times from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, population 29,534 in the midst of the Marcellus Shale formation that has become a hub of hydro-fracturing activity in the last decade.  Williamsport is the county seat of Lycoming County, which is barely "metropolitan" with a population of 116,747."  In fact, Lycoming County/Williamsport was the seventh fastest growing metropolitan area in the United States in 2010.  Schwartz explains why and how:

The common economic criticism of the drilling industry is that it booms and then busts, generating few local jobs and leaving little lasting economic benefit.

* * *

[Lycoming] county and ... Williamsport, are working diligently to position themselves not just as a host to the arriving companies, but also as a source of local workers for the industry and a long-term beneficiary of its local and national expansion.

Depending on whose estimates you believe, the number of jobs created by the Marcellus Shale extractive activity is between 20,000 and 234,000, with the low-end figure representing less than half a percent of all the state's jobs.  Some of those jobs are high skill, others low, as Schwartz notes that hotels and restaurants have popped up to accommodate the industry's workers.  

But as in other locales where fracking has taken hold, many locals are concerned about the environmental impact of the practice.  Among those in the Williamsport area with such concerns are Anne and Eric Nordell, who have had a 90-acre organic farm about 25 miles from Williamsport, in Trout Run, since the 1980s.  From the high point on their property, drilling rigs and the deforestation that have made way for them, are visible.  Schwartz quotes Ms. Nordell:

We’re just praying that our water will be safe.  ... The first indication that we have any type of contamination, we will shut down.  I eat the food that I grow, and I will not sell anything that’s unsafe.

One part of the Schwartz article contrasts this part of Pennsylvania with the extraction industry boom in North Dakota, which I have written about here.  An earlier post about the Marcellus Shale is here.

A view from down under (Part I): Initial observations from Queensland

I arrived in Queensland, Australia a few days ago, where I have taken up a short visitorship at the University of Southern Queensland in Toowoomba, a regional center about 120 kilometers west of the state capital, Brisbane.

I had the pleasure of spending about 30 hours in Brisbane before heading out to Toowoomba, and I got a tiny sense of Queenslander culture from its capital city.  Two impressions stand out.  One is in the sign I saw every time a surface street meets a motorway--prohibiting animals and tractors among other things.  Since I have seen very few animals here--not even domestic ones, let alone farm ones--the sign seems a bit out of place.  Ditto the prohibition of tractors.  I haven't seen a one in the great conurbation that is Brisbane.  Can't help wonder if this prohibition somehow echoes the state's agricultural history--and the significance of agriculture in the state's hinterlands--and by that I mean places not too far from Brisbane.

The man who sold me my cell phone told me that Brisbane had a reputation as the "largest country town in Australia."  When I asked what he meant, he referenced the early closing hours.  I noted that the Telstra shop we were in was closing as we spoke, at 6 pm, with all other shops in sight already shuttered for the evening.   I have also noticed that people seem to get up early here.  Lots of folks were on their way to work in the Central Business District by 6 am.  I also note the public sculpture, pictured left, on King George Square.  This tableau depicts an English family, the Petries, who lived in what became Queensland.  The father is preparing to depart for a journey as his wife hands him supplies and the children look on.   One of the Petrie boys depicted in the tableau, John Petrie, later became Brisbane's first mayor.

In my initial read of The Australian newspaper on July 31, I found two references to rural and regional issues.  ("Regional" is roughly the equivalent to "micropolitan" in the U.S.; it refers to a regional center that serves surrounding, smaller cities and towns).  The first was in a front-page story headlined "Blueprint to lift teaching standards," which reported on New South Wales' proposal to reform the education and credentialing of teachers.  The challenge NSW is addressing is "to lift standards and address the lack of maths, science and language teachers and the oversupply of primary and secondary teachers."  The proposal would "attack the practice of universities using teaching courses as a cash cow by enrolling as many students as possible to subsidize other more expensive to teach degrees."  The NSW proposal responds also to the shortage of teachers in rural and regional secondary schools by proposing that universities "offer training positions only in areas of need, such as high school maths and science and in rural and remote areas, and reduce the number of places in primary schools and metropolitan areas."  

The second was in a story headlined "Tax pinches small hospitals."  It reports on the disparate impact the carbon tax is having on "private and community not-for-profit hospitals," which are apparently mostly located in regional and rural places.  While the federal government has increased funding to the states for public hospitals, in an effort to minimize the impact of the carbon tax, these groups of hospitals serving smaller communities have been left out.  The cost of the carbon tax--which raises electricity rates--is about $1200/bed for hospitals, and no government relief is currently in sight.

Mendocino Sheriff's Dept. funding up in smoke

Read a story from the San Francisco Chronicle here. An excerpt follows:

[Officials in Mendocino County, California] have calculated the sheriff's department will be losing more than a half-million dollars in revenue after the Board of Supervisors voted last week to end the program of issuing permits to cannabis collectives.

The permits allowed the collectives to grow up to 99 plants at a time, but also required deputies to conduct monthly inspections.

In spite of this significant loss of revenue, the county sheriff has indicated that he does anticipate laying off any deputies. The U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California had warned Mendocino County officials that its practice was at odds with federal law.

Mendocino County, a nonmetropolitan county in northern California, covers 3,506 square miles. With a population of just over 87,000, its population density is 25.1 persons/square mile. The low population density and and heavily forested terrain often presents challenges for law enforcement. Read more here.

Farmville (Part III): Fruits of labor

Last week, our class we watched the documentary, "Morristown: In the Air and Sun." The documentary loosely presented neutral story lines: a factory outsourcing its jobs to Maquiladoras in Mexico; Mexican immigrants crossing the border into America; and the struggles these workers face. Some of the workers at the plant described how they worked in a factory fourteen hours a day without breaks or safety attire. The movie ended with the workers agreeing to unionize and achieve better working conditions.

I found the movie very intriguing because the stories of the factory workers' deplorable working conditions and lack of pay are much different than the experiences of workers on our ranch. Farm labor is very hard work. A typical harvest day is depicted here. Our farm workers are not members of a union; however, California residents have all benefited from the worker's rights movement.

The worker's rights movement picked up steam in the 1960's. Caesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta co-founded the National Farm Workers Association. The Association provided support to farm workers and notified them of pending lawsuits in Northern California. A copy of the Association's newsletter can be found here. The Association later became the United Farm Workers Association (UFW). Over the years, the UFW has organized strikes to protest for higher wages, lobbied for worker's rights bills, and provided a voice to the farm worker. Through the hard work of the UFW, the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act was passed. The act establishes collective bargaining for farm workers in California, something not provided in federal law.

One would think that since the workers rights movement was in the 1960's, many agricultural labor issues would be resolved. However, it seems that farm workers are more marginalized than ever. Movement of farm workers, lack of knowledge of available legal aid, and fear inhibit many farm workers from reporting unsafe working conditions and low wages.

In Morristown, the workers lived and worked in the same factory town all year long. Such permanent residency makes it easier to form unions, because turnover among workers is lower and permanent offices can be established. Since a high majority of farm workers work seasonally and travel year round, it is hard to keep track of union members and their specific needs. In Yuba City, we have the Western Farm Workers Association. In a telephone interview, the association informed me they won a legal battle last year, receiving a $300,000 award to be distributed to the farm workers involved in the lawsuit. However, the association is having a difficult time finding the farm workers, as they have likely moved on to a subsequent harvest.

A second issue hindering farm workers from receiving the benefits of unionizing and reporting poor working conditions is lack of knowledge of available legal resources. Even though farm workers have fought for better pay and working conditions in California since the 1960's, the Western Farm Workers Association informed me that many farm workers do not know when the law is on their side. The federal Migrant and Seasonal Worker Protection Act aims, "To assure necessary protections for migrant and seasonal agricultural workers, agricultural associations, and agricultural employers." 29 U.S.C.A. § 1801 (West). Specifically, the act requires employers to pay workers' wages prescribed by federal, state, and local regulation. Doe v. D.M. Camp & Sons, 624 F. Supp. 2d 1153 (E.D. Cal 2008).

Even if the farm workers understand the law protects them, fear is a third issue that impedes farm workers from unionizing. Like the workers in the documentary Morristown, many of the farm workers in my hometown are undocumented. This past week, I interviewed one of our workers, Marta. Marta informed me that fear of deportation stops many farm workers from reporting bad working conditions and low wages. She also stated that workers do not trust the legal community because lawyers have a hand in the deportation process.

As a farmer's daughter and future lawyer, I find these problems very disconcerting. It is upsetting to know that almost forty years after Caesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta started the National Farm Workers Association, fear still paralyzes many farm workers, preventing them from reporting low wages and deplorable working conditions. While legal resources are available and the UFW has national name recognition, perhaps more of a grass roots campaign is needed to inform workers of their rights. How can the legal community more effectively reach the migrant farm workers?

Another blog post about unionizing and farm workers can be found here

Cutbacks in "rural" air routes

Both NPR and the New York Times did stories this past week on impending cutbacks to commercial airline routes that serve small markets. Both used the word "rural" to characterize these markets, which are more accurately labeled nonmetropolitan.

Here's the lede for the Times story, which appeared in the business section and focuses on airline economics.

Rural America, already struggling to recover from the recession and the flight of its young people, is about to take another blow: the loss of its airline service.

That was underscored last week when Delta Air Lines announced that it “can no longer afford” to continue service at 24 small airports. The carrier says it is losing a total of $14 million a year on flights from places like Thief River Falls, a city of 8,600 in northwest Minnesota that fills only 12 percent of the seats, or Pierre, the capital of South Dakota, where Delta’s two daily flights are on average less than half full.

The map accompanying the story indicates that the states losing routes are Mississippi, Alabama, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, the Dakotas, and Montana. Delta took on many of these routes when it acquired Northwest Airlines. Serving these markets has been made more economically feasible by the nearly $200 million in federal subsidies that small airports receive in order "to maintain air service under the Essential Air Service program." Those subsidies are set to expire in 2013.

The NPR report is more focused on politics than business, as the headline suggests: "Partisan Dispute to Partially Shut down FAA." Here's the story's lede:

Efforts to avert a shutdown of the Federal Aviation Administration failed Friday amid a disagreement over a $16.5 million cut in subsidies to 13 rural communities, ensuring that nearly 4,000 people will be temporarily out of work and federal airline ticket taxes will be suspended.

* * *

But underlying the dispute on rural air service subsidies was a standoff between the GOP-controlled House and the Democratic-controlled Senate over a provision in long-term funding legislation for the FAA that would make it more difficult for airline and railroad workers to unionize.

Read more here.

Finally, this item in today's New York Times also mentions "rural airports" in passing. The story is about how wealthy families are now using private planes to get their kids to summer in camps in hard-to-reach places like Maine. One line notes that this week-end, a popular one for family visits to camps, "private planes jammed the runways at small rural airports" in Maine. I guess those families can pay whatever fees the small airports charge, even absent subsidies.

Population loss and gain in the Ozarks

The Newton County Times reported a few weeks ago on what the 2010 Census tells us about changing demographics in the county. The Feb. 16, 2011 headline is "Census: County lost 3.2%," and the story indicates that the county's population dropped from 8,608 in 2000 to 8,330 in 2010. The 2005-2009 ACS estimate for the county, at 8,311, was surprisingly close to the 2010 actual count.

The 2005-2009 ACS estimates for the county's two incorporated areas were less accurate. Jasper's population fell from 498 to 466 between 2000 and 2010, though the 2005-2009 ACS estimate put it at a much lower 357. Western Grove's population fell from 407 to 384 between 2000 and 2010, while the 2005-2009 ACS estimate has indicated a 20% increase, to 518.

The only neighboring county whose population also fell was Searcy County, which dropped less than 1%, from 8,261 to 8,195. Other surrounding counties saw relatively robust growth:

Pope County: a rise of 13.4% from 54,469 to 61,754
Johnson County: a 12.1% rise from 22,781 to 25,540
Madison County: a 10.3% rise from 14,243 to 15,717
Boone County: an 8.7% rise from 33,948 to 36,903

Data for neighboring Carrol County, which had a 2000 population of 25,357, was not provided. Carroll County has experienced an influx of Latina/o immigrants in the past few decades, and I would be surprised if its population fell between 2000 and 2010. Its 2005-2009 ACS estimate was 27,321.

The differences among these counties may be explained by their economies. Newton and Searcy counties are persistent poverty counties with very small populations, while surrounding counties tend to be micropolitan and to have more robust and diversified economies. Surrounding counties are also more likely to be economically entangled with even larger and more prosperous neighboring counties, in some cases serving as exurbs to metropolitan areas such as those in Washington and Sebastian counties.

This story also indicates that Newton County's participation rate in the Census was particularly low, at 60% for the entire county and 67% for the city of Jasper. This low participation rate, the story notes, results in a significant loss of federal funding for "schools, parks and other public facilities." Sadly, this may reflect the locals' distrust of the government.