These Rural Panhandle Towns Should be Shrinking. But Thanks to Immigrants, They're Booming.

At 1 a.m., after many rural Texas towns have turned in for the night, a light but steady stream of traffic rolls through the main drag of Dalhart, a Texas Panhandle town of 8,300. There’s a line for coffee at the Toot’n Totum downtown. Idling pickups and rattling trailers punctuate what would otherwise be a quiet, country night. It’s now that a small army of Mexican and Guatemalan laborers load into tractors and trailers, driving on gravel roads until they reach the potato furrows of Larsen Farms, a 3,700-acre operation just west of Dalhart. On one blustery October night, a bracing wind laced with the stench of cow manure whips through the treeless expanse. The only light comes from the high beams of the tractors plowing up the tubers and the encumbered trailers hauling them from the fields back to massive warehouses closer to town. Because the fragile-skinned potatoes can’t be harvested in the daytime heat, the workers toil when temperatures allow.

As tractors outfitted with conveyor belts churn the potatoes from the earth and shoot them into open tractor-trailers, Luis Ramos tails the machines in a pickup. The 44-year-old from Durango, Mexico, monitors the harvesting teams and fixes mechanical problems with the machinery. Other workers operate the harvesting equipment, while still others sort bad potatoes from good. The hours are rough, sometimes 1 a.m. to 3 p.m., and the pay’s not great, usually less than $12 an hour. Most U.S. citizens just don’t want the work. But for Ramos, the logic is inexorable: “What I make here in a day, I can’t make in a week back home.”

Ramos and other immigrants have helped transform many dying Panhandle towns into agricultural boomtowns, injecting economic and social vigor into communities with uncertain futures. Despite a decline in native-born residents, a belt of communities in the Panhandle — Dalhart, Sunray and Dumas — and several others near the Texas-Mexico border are growing. Dalhart has grown 7 percent from 1990 to 2016, even as the native-born population has dropped 9 percent. Hispanics, primarily of Mexican descent, now make up 39 percent of the town’s population. The Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, released a report earlier this year tracking immigration in rural America, finding that immigrants were “putting communities on a path to prosperity” by mitigating population loss in small towns. Statewide, Texas added 400,000 residents in 2017, bringing its total population to 28.3 million. About one-quarter of that growth is attributed to international migration.

But Texas’ population gains haven’t been distributed equally throughout the state, and some parts of rural Texas have been left out. In Lorraine, for instance, the small farms that once drove the economy in this Big Country town of 582 people have dried up, and many folks have left. Storefronts downtown are mostly vacant, boarded up or demolished. The local public school, which serves K-12 and an unusually high number of homeless students, is one of the few institutions left. Even the churches can’t fill their sanctuaries anymore. The tiny community of Crowell, located 80 miles west of Wichita Falls, has seen its population dwindle by half since 1950. “It’s just headed in the wrong direction,” one resident told the Dallas Morning News in 2015. “You can feel it.”

Read more: https://www.texasobserver.org/these-rural-panhandle-towns-should-be-shrinking-but-thanks-to-immigrants-theyre-booming/