The US birthrate is dropping. This Iowa county is an exception.

In 2006, Iowa’s governor, Tom Vilsack, made a pitch to young Iowans who had moved away, leaving behind a shrinking, aging workforce. His “Come back to Iowa, please” campaign targeted college graduates living in cities like New York and Los Angeles, where Mr. Vilsack hosted cocktail parties and promised that Iowa offered more than “hogs, acres of corn, and old people.”

The campaign fizzled out as young Iowans continued to seek bright lights elsewhere after college, part of a perennial brain drain still facing this and other Midwestern states. 

But Iowa has had far greater success attracting another group: immigrants from Mexico and Central America. 

In the 2020 census, Sioux County was one of the only nonmetropolitan counties in Iowa that grew its population. Sioux Center, the largest town, has nearly 9,000 residents today, up from 7,000 in 2010. Its rural industries and services are drawing in foreign and U.S.-born workers who slaughter pigs, milk cows, collect eggs, and build houses and schools for a growing population. 

Mexicans have long moved to Iowa for work, beginning in the 1880s with railroad and farm laborers, though their numbers remained small. That changed in the 1990s as meat packers began to recruit more migrants and refugees. By 2022, Hispanics or Latinos comprised 6.9% of Iowa’s population, or 221,805 people, of which around three-quarters were Mexican, up from less than 20,000 in 1970.

Some of the newcomers had work permits. Others didn’t. In rural towns, they began arriving in larger numbers to work on farms and in factories. Migrants joined and founded churches, set up small businesses, and started families. “They come here to get a job, to earn money, and to live better,” says Carlos Perez, a Venezuelan-born evangelical pastor who moved to Iowa in 2019.

To some, Sioux County offers a vision of immigration as a growth engine in an era of falling fertility throughout the United States. Having peaked in 2007 at 4.3 million per year, births began falling in 2008. They hit a new low last year at 3.7 million.

Without immigrants, the U.S. working-age population will soon begin shrinking as fewer young adults replace millions of retiring boomers. Migrants skew younger and are more likely to bear children of their own. For rural counties that have long struggled to retain young people, migration can be a force multiplier. 

“Even by adding just a few hundred immigrants a year, it can make a dramatic change over a decade in reversing population decline,” says Phillip Connor, senior demographer at Fwd.us, a pro-immigration advocacy group in Washington, who authored a 2023 report on the impact of immigration on rural counties, including Sioux County. 

Countries like Canada and Australia have already embraced this strategy to mitigate similar demographic challenges, welcoming higher numbers of foreign-born workers to offset falling birthrates. In the U.S., overall deaths are now forecast to exceed births by 2038, according to Census Bureau projections. Immigration, in fact, is making the difference between many states’ population growth and contraction. 

The math may add up, but mass immigration to offset population decline faces stiff political, social, and cultural resistance.

Under President Joe Biden, a post-pandemic surge of crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border has splintered pro-immigration Democrats, including leaders in cities that are hubs for migration. In February, Republicans in Congress killed a bipartisan border bill that would have restricted crossings by asylum-seekers and ramped up border security. Notably, the bill offered no legal pathways for millions of unauthorized migrants, including foreign-born children raised in the U.S. and known as “Dreamers,” who once commanded bipartisan sympathy. 

Many Republicans have hardened in their opposition to mass immigration. Among Republicans, around half favor a decrease in legal immigration, a share that rose to two-thirds among pro-Donald Trump Republicans, according to a Chicago Council poll taken last September. Only 25% of poll respondents said legal immigration to the U.S. should be increased. 

In Iowa, a poll of GOP presidential caucusgoers in January found that 40% picked immigration as the nation’s top issue, ahead of the economy. Three-quarters said that immigrants “do more to hurt the country” than to help it. 

Other polling shows more support for migrants. In a February poll by The Wall Street Journal, three-quarters of respondents said unauthorized immigrants who have been in the U.S. for many years and pass background checks should be given a path to citizenship. One in 5 said immigration was their top issue. And a majority supported an increase in legal immigration. 

Building for the future 

Immigrants, numbering roughly 46 million people, are estimated to make up 14% of the current U.S. population. In 2022, 1 in 4 school-age children had at least one immigrant parent. 

In Sioux Center, a town of modest, well-kept houses hemmed by cropland and industrial plants, the public school system has expanded to serve an increasingly diverse population. It currently enrolls 1,641 students, up from around 1,100 a decade ago, of which nearly half are nonwhite. To meet rising demand, the town has built a preschool, rejiggered its middle school grades, and opened a brand-new high school in 2021 with over 500 students and capacity to serve up to 800. “We’ve built for the future,” says Gary McEldowney, the Sioux Center Community School District superintendent. 

That expansion bucks a national trend of shrinking high school classes as smaller birth cohorts move up the K-12 ladder. The overall number of high school seniors in 2028 is projected to be 3.6 million, down 14% from 2008, when the U.S. fertility rate began its vertiginous slide.

Sioux Center’s growth has been propelled by immigrants and their children, primarily from Spanish-speaking countries. Its schools have hired or trained bilingual staff and send out school communications in Spanish and English. One in 4 students is an English learner. Both the high school and middle school now have soccer teams for boys and girls, reflecting the sport’s popularity among Hispanics in particular. Conversations on the playground are mostly in English as laughing children race around in the frosty morning air with beanie hats pulled low.

Troy Lentell, the principal of Kinsey Elementary School, previously worked as a principal in another rural district in Iowa that struggled with low and declining school enrollment. “The conversation was how to get creative to keep the doors open,” he says. By contrast, Sioux Center “has to be creative to have enough schools and space for our kids.”  

The high school’s construction was funded with a $25 million bond that passed with 76% approval in 2019. A significant number of those voters, many of whom work in farming and manufacturing, will send their own children to private Christian schools, which have deep roots in the community, notes Mr. McEldowney. “We have been very blessed with our building projects,” he says. 

Churches play a big role in Sioux Center. The town was settled by Dutch farmers in the 19th century, as was Orange City, the county seat. Both towns have private, church-affiliated colleges. Orange City plays up its Dutch roots with decorative windmills, Dutch-style gables on storefronts, and an annual tulip festival in May. Virtually all stores in both towns close on Sundays, when it’s also verboten to mow your lawn, a source of confusion for newcomers.

Residents take pride in Sioux Center’s safety. “I don’t know where my house keys are,” says John Lee, the pastor of Bethel Christian Reformed Church, which occupies a striking A-frame building that evokes praying hands to drivers on the town’s main road. 

A former missionary in Nicaragua, Mr. Lee has welcomed Sioux Center’s newest wave of Hispanic immigrants and encouraged his 800 or so regular worshippers to do the same. Church members have sponsored over 100 Ukrainian refugees to resettle in the community, he notes. But he also stands with immigrants who don’t have legal status, a stance less popular among his mostly Republican-voting congregation. 

“As Christians, there’s an obligation to our neighbors,” he says, “whether those neighbors have papers or not.”

That many of the recent Central American newcomers are Christian, both Catholic and, increasingly, Evangelicals, helps smooth their path in Sioux Center. A newly rebuilt Catholic church overflows on Sundays during Spanish-language services. Mr. Perez, the evangelical pastor, moved to Sioux Center with his wife so that his church could reach more immigrants. “We feel very welcome in this community,” he says. 

But the growing Hispanic presence in this rural corner of Iowa has also met nativist resistance.

Race-based fears  

Sioux County is in Iowa’s 4th Congressional District, which until 2020 was held by nine-term Rep. Steve King. Mr. King, a Republican, gained national notoriety for a series of racist remarks that eventually led GOP leaders to remove him from House committees. 

In 2017, Mr. King wrote on Twitter, now called X, in support of far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who, he said, “understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”  

His tweet surfaced a far-right conspiracy theory that elites in Europe and the U.S. are leveraging immigration to make white people into minorities in their countries. Known as the “Great Replacement,” the theory has been widely promoted by pro-Trump media outlets. In September, Mr. Trump, who is seeking a second term as president, said that migrants living in the U.S. illegally were “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing language used by fascist dictatorships in Europe. 

Mr. King wasn’t alone in his race-based views on mass migration in rural Iowa, says Mark Grey, an anthropologist at the University of Northern Iowa who has studied migration trends in the area. Many older white voters see migrants not as an answer to rural depopulation but as a cultural threat. Mr. King “was just saying out loud what a lot of his voters believed,” he says.

Fears over the country’s “racial stock” were common a century ago, when a wave of immigration from southern Europe and Eastern Europe fueled widespread nativism, says Nancy Foner, a sociologist at Hunter College. President Theodore Roosevelt warned that white Anglo-Saxons risked “race suicide” if the newcomers outbred them. These nativist reactions led Congress to restrict the admission of racial and religious minorities, culminating in an immigration bill passed in 1924. “Those were the arguments used to justify the 1924 Act,” says Professor Foner, author of “One Quarter of the Nation: Immigration and the Transformation of America.”

In 2020, Mr. King was defeated in a GOP primary by Randy Feenstra, a state senator. His biggest losing margin came in Sioux County, where many cheered his downfall. “It was a clear mandate” for a different approach, says Titus Landegent, who teaches a bilingual gifted and talented program at Kinsey Elementary School.

Mr. King’s comment about “somebody else’s babies” ignores the fact that white, native-born residents are also having babies, says Mr. Lee, the pastor, who celebrated 26 baptisms at his church last year. Mixed marriages, a time-tested path to social integration in America, are starting to happen here, too, as are bilingual church services aimed at bridging divides. At the same time, some residents drive to Walmart in another town to avoid shopping in Sioux Center among immigrants.

Mr. Lee is optimistic that different cultures can coexist in Sioux County and, in time, come together. “Change can be hard. ... Fear is part of the human experience. We have to name it. But hope is part of our human experience, too.”  

Need for rural workers 

In Iowa, business leaders and their political allies have long been a countervailing force in immigration policy, seeing migrants as essential to their current and future workforce, particularly in rural areas. That has become much harder in recent years, says Professor Grey, who has consulted for companies that hire migrants. National immigration debates increasingly drive Iowa’s GOP-dominated state government and its policies, while business groups that favor immigration “have really gone dormant,” he says. 

Some Republican state governors have swum against the “Make America Great Again” tide, arguing that rural America urgently needs more immigrants to fill job vacancies in agriculture, health care, and other services. They argue that states should be allowed to sponsor immigrants if the federal government won’t issue more work-based visas. Mr. Vilsack, now President Biden’s secretary of agriculture, struck a similar tone when he was Iowa’s governor, seeking exemptions from federal restrictions on foreign workers as part of a population recovery plan. 

Tiffany O’Donnell, the Republican mayor of Cedar Rapids, told Bloomberg last year that the “broken” immigration system was affecting her community, a corn-processing hub in eastern Iowa. “We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t figure out how to connect someone in Central America to the thousands of jobs we have in this state,” she says.

Critics say rural industries want to loosen visa rules so they can exploit migrants and undercut the wages of local workers. But while such labor abuses have been documented in Iowa, there’s little evidence that immigrants are displacing native-born workers. 

In his report, Mr. Connors, the demographer, studied population and labor-market data in 1,300 rural counties. In 2020, more than three-quarters had fewer working-age adults than 20 years ago, leaving behind a rapidly aging population for the available jobs. “Their unemployment rates are very low. The need for workers in almost every rural county exists,” says Mr. Connors. 

Migration into shrinking rural communities also adds to the demand for services, including those related to childbearing. Sioux Center has a hospital with a birthing center and a federally funded clinic that provides midwives for home births. But across the rest of Iowa, hospitals have shuttered birthing centers due to lower births, staffing shortages, and financial burdens. Fewer than half of Iowa’s 99 counties now have a labor and delivery center, forcing mothers to drive further to deliver in a hospital setting.  

Tracing change through one young person’s life 

Diana Vera was among the first in the latest wave of Hispanics into Sioux Center, moving here with her parents from Mexico in 2002 at age 1. The family lived four to a room in a mobile home with an aunt, and her father worked nights on a hog farm. Ms. Vera and her older brother went to school by bus because her mother was scared to drive. The family had come to the country illegally, a realization that dawned on Ms. Vera as she grew up. “It was just a risk we had to take,” she says.

At school, she was a joiner, taking part in sports and music. Most of her friends were white and would make disparaging remarks about Hispanics. Mr. Trump’s election in 2016 and his anti-immigrant rhetoric added fuel to the fire. “It’s so hard to see how, as a Christian, you’d support that,” she says. 

She was 15 when she registered for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protects her from deportation but provides no path to citizenship. Her two younger siblings were born in the U.S. and are growing up in a town that has changed dramatically since Ms. Vera first arrived. “My sisters have friends who look like them,” she says. 

In 2022, Ms. Vera graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in global health studies. She’s now working as a medical assistant at the the federally funded health clinic in Sioux Center that serves many migrants, interpreting for Spanish-speaking patients. But for all the demographic change here, Ms. Vera sees limits for newcomers. “They don’t want us to have a seat at the table,” she says. 

Her father now holds a supervisory position at a dairy farm but lacks permanent legal status. Similarly, Ms. Vera and her brother, a software engineer who is also a DACA recipient, know their immigration status remains contingent on political winds. Perhaps she’ll have to emigrate to a country that is more receptive to migrants, she muses.  

For now, she’s applying for graduate programs and is ready to leave Sioux County behind like other educated youth before her. Ms. Vera’s father has always encouraged her ambitions. “He told me, ‘A bird can’t always stay in its nest. It has to go out,’” she says. 

This is the second in a three-part series on falling birthrates in the U.S. and the world. The first in the series, about U.S. parents having fewer children, can be found here. The third, about tumbling global birthrates and hard societal choices ahead, can be found here.

Editor's note: The original version of this story misstated where John Lee did his missionary service.