‘They Age and Shrink and Die’ — Immigration Crackdowns Threaten Growth in Rural America

In rural and small-town America, communities that leaned on immigrants to revive their workforce and economies after decades of population loss are watching that lifeline disappear.

For the first time in at least half a century, immigration to the United States turned net negative in 2025. The country is on track to continue that trend this year amid continued deportations, forcing shrinking U.S. communities to confront the looming possibility that the same individuals who helped stabilize them could disappear.

A population lifeline

Tim Slack, professor of Sociology at Louisiana State University, discusses population loss in rural American and how immigration is keeping small towns alive.

Immigration has functioned as “a population lifeline” for rural America, offsetting economic and demographic losses caused by aging populations and young adults leaving for education and jobs, said Tim Slack, a sociology professor at Louisiana State University, at an Aug. 14 American Community Media briefing.

From 2010 to 2020, the total population of U.S. rural counties fell by about half a percentage point — an unprecedented decadal decline — with roughly two-thirds of rural counties losing population and one-third gaining.

Of the rural counties that grew, many did so only because immigrant population growth offset a decline among non-Hispanic white residents, Slack said: “In rural counties that are not adjacent to a metro, nearly all the positive net migration was international.”

As a result, about one in four rural U.S. residents are now nonwhite, while roughly one in three rural children are nonwhite. Nationwide, immigrants comprise roughly 15% of the U.S. population and 19% of the workforce as of June 2025.

Mark Prosser, the former police chief of Storm Lake, Iowa, who now works with the Diocese of Sioux City, watched that transformation happening on the ground for over 30 years, as immigration turned a shrinking, nearly all-white community into one with expanding jobs and housing.

Roughly two-thirds of students in Storm Lake’s grade schools now speak a language other than English at home, he said. While nearby Iowa communities have been forced to consolidate school systems because of declining enrollment, communities like Storm Lake that have attracted immigrants have built new schools instead.

“When I moved here it was blue, and then evolved to purple, and now it’s very red,” he continued. Referring to the political repercussions of the Trump administration’s ongoing mass deportation campaign he added, “That pendulum is starting to swing because all of a sudden, conservatives are seeing their neighbors impacted.”

Recent polling shows Trump and Republicans losing ground on immigration, long the president’s strongest issue.

Between 600,000 and 675,000 people have been deported since Trump took office in 2025, according to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data, while a record 65,000 people remain in immigrant detention nationwide.

“The majority of the people being detained and being removed have no criminal record,” Prosser added. “All of a sudden, their children’s friends in school are not sitting in the classroom on Monday morning because they’ve been detained.”

The crackdown in Springfield

Dr. Carl Ruby, senior pastor of Central Christian Church in Springfield, Ohio, discusses the impact of Trump’s deportation agenda on both the Haitian community and the city of Springfield Ohio where many Haitian immigrants live.

Those impacts were visible last week in Springfield, Ohio, where federal immigration agents detained members of the city’s Haitian community in a crackdown that emptied church pews and grocery store aisles.

Roughly 15,000 Haitian immigrants, many with Temporary Protected Status (TPS), began arriving around 2020, the first time the population in this Rust Belt city — now around 58,000 — had grown since 1960.

A late June Supreme Court ruling green lighted the administration’s efforts to end TPS for roughly 350,000 Haitians nationwide. Those protections — which include temporary relief from deportation and work authorization — ended July 27. The administration has, to date, targeted 13 of 17 countries currently designated under the TPS program, affecting more than one million immigrants.

“People from my church are being fitted with ankle monitors, picked up by ICE,” said Dr. Carl Ruby, senior pastor of Central Christian Church, whose congregation has grown from 125 to 160 members over the past year, driven entirely by Haitian newcomers.

“Our county government is funded by sales tax, and they’re not going out and shopping right now. We normally would have about 50 Haitians in a church service, and we had almost none this past Sunday. They’re just afraid to leave their homes,” he continued. “We went from having lots of hardworking immigrants to all of a sudden having 10 to 15,000 people who’ve had their jobs taken away from them.”

Haiti’s TPS classification began after a catastrophic earthquake in 2010 and was extended by succeeding administrations, including briefly under the first Trump administration, due to continued national violence and corruption.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine called plans by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in late July to ramp up operations to arrest and deport Haitian migrants “a mistake,” “a blow to Springfield” and “a blow to the state of Ohio,” adding, “The Haitians who are living there and employed there, they came there to work, and they came there because there were jobs that were not being filled by other people.”

Ruby recalled DeWine asking a local business owner how difficult it would be to replace his Haitian workers. The owner said, “It will take several Americans to replace each worker,” according to Ruby, adding Haitian employees “always show up for work, they always pass drug tests, they take as much overtime as they can get, and they just work really hard.”

“A lot of the immigrants were staffing our retirement homes, so not only were they having children, they’re caring for our elderly. Those were jobs we had a hard time filling,” said Ruby.

The economic cost

Rachel Perić, executive director of Welcoming America, discusses the Great Replacement narrative, which argues that non-white immigrants will replace white Americans and white American culture.

Jennie Murray, president and CEO of the National Immigration Forum (NIF), pointed to data showing that immigrants pay nearly $652 billion annually in combined federal, state and local taxes and generate about $1.7 trillion in consumer spending.

“American businesses having less workers, less people contributing to the economy, less people paying in taxes for things like Social Security, we’re looking at a pretty dire impact overall,” Murray said.

The Congressional Budget Office projected an $8.9 trillion GDP increase from 2024 to 2034 due to immigrants, Murray added. “We can no longer count on that number.”

Rachel Perić, executive director of Welcoming America, said the effects are also social: “Rural places are seeing the results of a real breakdown in trust and relationships, with communities fracturing as a result of many of the federal policies aimed at both expelling people from the country, and sowing a lot of fear and division.”

NIF polling shows that 80% of registered Republicans support Republicans and Democrats working together on “immigration solutions that balance border security, prioritized enforcement, asylum updates and beneficial legal-immigration pathways,” versus 12% in opposition.

“We can’t make our communities whole and we can’t make our communities function if we don’t have efforts to create an environment where people want to come and want to put down roots,” Perić said.

“What happens to these towns is they age and shrink and die,” Slack added. “If rural communities in this country are going to survive, immigration has to be part of that equation.”