UNIVERSITY OF OREGON

Two groups of migrants - aging baby boomers and Latino immigrants - are converging on rural America, and combined 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. Drawing on work from the urban geography literature, we explore whether the arrival of Latino immigrants in certain nonmetropolitan destinations is functionally linked to the in-migration of baby boomers. We also examine how these potentially linked migration streams are transforming rural labor markets. This proposal draws on the combined expertise of the Principal Investigator's (PI) to develop a two-staged, multi-scaled and mixed-methodology research plan to answer two research questions. *RQ1*: What geographic and socio-economic characteristics distinguish the nonmetropolitan destinations with evidence of linked migration streams from the rest of nonmetropolitan America? *RQ2*: What labor market dynamics develop in these nonmetropolitan areas with linked migration streams? Stage 1 will utilize publicly available census data to identify counties attracting higher than expected flows of baby boomers and Latinos and ones that show evidence of rural gentrification - a force theoretically tied to linked migration streams. Stage 1 will also involve mapping these population groups at the sub-county level to examine the micro-scale socioeconomic geographies of these linked destinations. Stage 1 will ultimately provide a rich description of destinations where these migration streams converge, and it will serve as a basis for identifying case studies for more in-depth analysis (Stage 2). The qualitative analysis in stage 2 will focus on labor market experiences of Latino workers, non-Latino workers, and private employers. During intensive fieldwork in each community, interviews, participant observation, and textual analysis will provide data relevant to both research questions. Combined, the research project will transform our understanding of rural gentrification and its impact on labor markets. By identifying connections between domestic migration and transnational immigration into rural areas, the proposed project will fuse two previously separate bodies of literature and deepen our understanding of migration's impacts on rural destinations. In addition, examining linked migration systems and labor market dynamics within rural spaces will extend to rural contexts understandings of gentrification and globalization drawn from urban based scholarship. Finally, the 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 re-shape domestic and transnational migration streams, as well as generate socioeconomic change at different geographic scales.

Clarification of Codes