Collaborative Research: Linked Migration and Changing Labor Markets in the Rural United States

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Two groups of migrants, aging baby boomers and Latino immigrants, are converging on rural America. Together, these groups will significantly transform their destination communities in the coming decades. While these migration streams have each attracted scholarly attention, work to date has treated these groups of migrants separately, leaving unstudied how their combined effects are reshaping rural places. Using a two-staged methodology, this collaborative research project will explore potential economic linkages between the Latino immigrants and baby boomers arriving in the same or nearby rural destinations. The project also will examine how these linked migration streams are transforming rural labor markets. In Stage 1, the investigators will use publicly available census data to identify areas attracting higher-than-expected flows of both baby boomers and Latinos. They also will examine areas that show evidence of rural gentrification, a force theoretically tied to linked migration streams. Maps of these population groups at the sub-county level developed at this stage will facilitate visualization of the micro-scale social geographies of these destinations with linked migration streams. Stage 2 of the project will involve intensive community case studies and will focus on labor-market experiences of Latino workers, non-Latino workers, and private employers. During Stage 2, the investigators will use interviews, participant observation, and textual analysis to determine how rural labor markets are transformed in the wake of increasingly diverse migration streams.This project will provide key insights into critical forces of rural restructuring that are likely to substantially increase in the coming years. Rural communities need to better understand these demographic transformations, because more than 5 million new baby boomer migrants are likely to arrive in nonmetropolitan destinations by 2020, and Latino migration is unlikely to subside. This project will generate new empirical and theoretical understandings of the ways in which aggregate transformations in the age structure of the population are likely to reshape domestic and transnational migration streams as well as generate socioeconomic change at different geographic scales. Furthermore, examinations of linked migration systems and labor market dynamics within rural spaces will reframe understandings of gentrification and globalization, which to date largely have been drawn from urban-based scholarship. Finally, the project will build a collaborative research relationship between a major research university and an undergraduate institution. Undergraduate and graduate research assistants will gain scientific expertise through their involvement with the project, and the data collected as part of this project will enhance existing undergraduate course offerings at both institutions.