Texas & Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association Announces Summer 2023 Internship Opportunities

The Texas & Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association (TSCRA) is now accepting applications for summer 2023 internship programs.

TSCRA internship programs offer one-of-a-kind opportunities for students to network with stakeholders throughout the beef industry and gain valuable experience while working alongside TSCRA staff and leadership. All experiences are paid and offer hands-on opportunities to play an active role in association happenings. Summer 2023 opportunities include:

■ TSCRA Fort Worth Internship: Summer-long internship in Fort Worth for students interested in experiencing a wide range of opportunities including administration, communications, education, events, membership and more

■ TSCRA Government Relations Internship: Summer-long internship in Austin for students interested in learning how TSCRA represents livestock producers at the Texas Capitol

Emily Lochner, the association’s executive director of engagement and education, said this is an incredible program that exposes students to careers in agriculture.

“We believe strongly in the importance of engaging young leaders in the cattle industry,” Lochner said. “These internship programs allow students to be fully integrated into TSCRA and gain a broad industry perspective, while providing valuable insight to a career in agriculture.”

Applications to the summer 2023 internship opportunities are due March 17, 2023. Additional details including submission instructions are accessible at https://tscra. org/who-we-are/employment ▫

Reports from the US Post Office show that 37 people moved to the area between 2020 and 2021, compared to 15 people between 2018 and 2019.

The numbers may seem small, but they amount to two percent growth last year.

That growth would not have occurred if it were not for migration, since deaths outnumbered births in Powder River at the same time.

Powder River was not alone. After a historic loss in population in the previous decade, rural, or nonmetropolitan, counties grew by 0.13 percent from 2020-21, according to Census estimates.

In an article in Rural Sociology, University of New Hampshire demographer Ken Johnson says that about a third of nonmetro counties gained population from 2020 to 2021, despite a spike in deaths from Covid-19.

The growth was most pronounced in counties like Powder River, Montana, where rec- reational activities like hunting are a major part of the economy, or where there are attractive natural amenities like mountains, lakes, and seashores.

Covid-19 and Population Change: Not as Simple as it Seems

One factor that changes population size is natural increase or decrease. That’s the net of births minus deaths. If more people die than are born, there is natural decrease. Natural increase occurs when more people are born than die in a county. Net migration, on the other hand, occurs when more people move into an area than those that leave.

During the pandemic, rural America exemplified a complicated relationship between net migration and natural increase.

Over a third of rural counties experienced population growth because of a rare combination of natural decrease and net migration between April of 2020 and July of 2021. Between 2010 and 2020, only 13 percent of rural counties experienced pop- ulation growth in this way, according to Johnson’s research.

Between April of 2020 and July of 2021, rural America grew by 0.13 percent, even though the number of deaths were 0.29 percent higher than the number of births. Population growth only occurred in these places because people moved there, offsetting the effect of natural decrease.

Between July 2020 and July 2021, Covid-19 produced a 20 percent spike in rural deaths and a five percent drop in births, exacerbating an existing trend of natural decrease in nonmetropolitan areas. Between 2020 and 2021, there were 131,000 more deaths than births in rural counties, compared to the two years prior when there were only 2,000 more deaths than births, Johnson reported.

Four out of five rural counties had more deaths than births between April 2020 and July 2021. Two years prior, only about half of rural counties had more people die than be born.

But because more people moved to rural places, the rural northern border was tragically illustrated January 19, when two adults, a teen and an infant from India were found frozen to death in a vehicle 40 feet from the border in North Dakota.

Temperatures had dropped to 13 degrees below zero during the group’s 11hour trek near the Canadian border as they left a vehicle and tried to enter the US on foot, officials said.

A Florida man was arrested for trying to smuggle them and a van full of fellow illicit border crossers into the US.

The CBP’s “Grand Forks Sector,” which covers Minnesota and North Dakota, saw 90 apprehensions in the last three months of 2022, compared to just 80 during the entire year before, the Daily Mail reported Sunday.

BP said in its release that the number of people illegally entering the US from Canada in its Swanson Sector in the past three months was more than in the previous two years combined but did not provide specific numbers.

By comparison, there were more than 700,000 encounters reported by authorities during the same time period at the US’s southwestern border with Mexico.

Asylum-seekers flooded to the country there as a pandemic-era emergency measure that had expelled millions of them was expected to expire.

Those trying to enter the US through Canada face a unique set of hazards.

“Reckless endangerment: In freezing temperatures over uncertain terrain, families with children, from just a few months old, continue to illegally cross from Canada into the US. The risk to human lives – including Border eas, compared to only 13,000 that moved to urban areas. It’s rare that rural growth outpaces urban growth at such a rate, according to Johnson.

Patrol agents – is increasing,” Garcia said.

As illegal crossings soared in upstate New York and New England, so did violence. Nine assaults were recorded in connection with illegal Canadian crossings from July to November, after authorities reported no attacks for the previous 27 months, officials reportedly said.

A Mexican national who flew to Canada to enter the US illegally from the north pleaded guilty to “unlawfully entering the United States and assaulting and resisting a federal agent” and now faces a year in prison and a fine of up to $100,000.

CBP has warned that the frozen northern border terrain, covered with snow and ice, makes “traversing unfamiliar territory perilous,” and officials have ended up “rendering potentially life-saving aid” to groups of people with small children trying to enter the US on foot.

“Swanton Sector’s greatest concern in carrying out our mission of border security is the preservation of life – the lives of community residents we are sworn to protect, the lives of our Border Patrol Agents carrying out the mission day-in and dayout in the field, and the lives of the individuals, families, and children we are charged with apprehending as they attempt to circumvent legal processes for entry,” Garcia said.

“Unfortunately, the transnational criminal organizations that stand to profit from the increased flow of human traffic care only about profits and have no concern for the welfare of those whose plight they seek to exploit for financial gain.” ▫

Powder River County, Montana

population did not plummet. Rural counties experienced more in-migration than urban areas over the course of the pandemic. While metropolitan areas showed no change in net migration, rural places overall experienced a net migration change of 0.43 percent between April 2020 and July 2021, Johnson reported.

If it wasn’t for migration, rural America would have experienced a population drop since 2020. But Johnson’s study discovered rural growth in the 15 months after the 2020 Census as rural America grew by approximately 77,000 residents. Rural counties grew by 0.13 percent between 2020 and 2021, while urban areas only grew by 0.1 percent.

Rural places grew more than urban ones not only by percentage, but in absolute numbers. While 167,000 people moved out of rural areas, 244,000 moved into rural ar-

Rural Population Change Is Not the Same Everywhere

Johnson found that almost all rural growth happened in retirement destinations or in counties with economies dependent on recreation. Eighty percent of recreation and retirement-dependent counties experienced population growth because of migration between 2020 and 2021, compared to 36 percent of counties dependent on manufacturing and 43 percent of counties dependent on farming.

In rural recreation areas like Powder River, Montana, there were 0.14 percent more deaths than births between April of 2020 and July of 2021. But net migration increased by 0.74 percent, contributing to an overall growth rate of 0.59 percent in rural recreation communities and a total of 137,000 more residents.

Migration and Remote Work

Johnson suggests that new opportunities for remote work because of Covid-19 probably contributed to rural population growth in the months following the 2020 census.

With more flexible work schedules, some are foregoing high costs of living in urban centers in favor of rural areas with more outdoor amenities. Sometimes referred to as ‘amenity migrants,’ these rural living enthusiasts are taking advantage of pandemic-induced work changes. The places where amenity migrants congregate are now called ‘Zoom towns,’ in reference to Boom towns, or areas that experienced population booms because of an expanding oil sector.

Seasonal visitors with second homes in amenity destinations have probably also contributed to rural population growth, writes Johnson. Urbanites who were once just seasonal residents may have taken up more long-term stays, possibly even turning their second homes into primary residences.

Johnson writes that it’s too soon to tell whether these population trends will continue as the pandemic evolves. But if they keep up, we can expect rural America to grow by 1.3 percent by 2030, a 23 percent higher rate than the projected urban rate. ▫