Editor’s Note: Rio Grande Valley Business Journal news reporter Kristen Mosbrucker-Garza interviewed Lloyd B. Potter, who has served as the Texas State Demographer for the past 15 years. Potter is also the Director of the Institute for Demographic and Socioeconomic Research and is a professor emeritus at the University of Texas at San Antonio. The following interview transcript has been edited for clarity.
The changing socioeconomic demographics of a region like the Rio Grande Valley matter as a key driver for business executives considering investment opportunities — or not.
Over the decades, key economic indicators about the Rio Grande Valley have changed, while others continue to lag behind.
RGV baby boom drove growth, starts to slow
Kristen Mosbrucker-Garza | Rio Grande Valley Business Journal: Over the past decade, [between 2014 and 2024], how has the Rio Grande Valley’s population changed in terms of natural births? (This refers to women having children, adding to the total number of residents.)
Lloyd Potter | Texas State Demographer: When we look at population change, we often refer to two components [births and deaths], but there’s really three or four components [inbound and outbound migration patterns] depending on how you look at a population change. The first [components] are births and deaths, that’s a major thing. If you have a closed population [without migration in or out], the only way the population changes is [that] you have people dying and babies being born.
If you look at the Rio Grande Valley, given that the population there is largely of Hispanic descent, birth rates have historically been higher. The other component of this is that the population is relatively young in the Rio Grande Valley. When I say young, the median age is younger. So there aren’t that many people in the older ages, and there are, relatively speaking, more people at the younger ages. So the net result of that is there aren’t that many people dying, because you have a younger population, and you have, relatively speaking, compared to much of the rest of the state, higher birth rates. The net result of that is growth, much of the growth that’s occurring in the counties along the Rio Grande Valley is being driven by more births than deaths. That’s a significant component of population change and a natural increase, just more births than deaths. That said, birth rates have been declining pretty dramatically, in particular among Latinas. We saw with the [Great] Recession, the 2007-2008 recession, we started seeing a decline in birth rates, not just for Hispanics, but [with] Hispanics, because their rates were so high, relatively speaking, we saw a pretty steep decline. Their rates are still higher than for non-Hispanic whites and for non-Hispanic African Americans and other racial and ethnic groups, but they’re moving toward parity, and you’ve seen that continue over the decade, even up until the early 2020s. So we’ve seen a pretty steady decline, and a precipitous decline, particularly among Hispanics, and so the net result of that, I think, for the Rio Grande Valley has been that the component of natural increase has slowed in terms of driving much of the growth for those counties. And then you also have a bit of aging of the population as well, so you have probably slightly more deaths than what you were seeing more than 10 years ago or so. So the net result is that natural increase is still a major contributor, but it has slowed compared to what it looked like 10 or 15 years ago.
International migrants turn domestic in the data
Lloyd Potter | Texas State Demographer: Now, that said, the other component of change is migration, and the Census Bureau, in their population estimates, breaks out migration into what they refer to as domestic migration. Which is people moving within the United States. And then international migration, so that’s people whose last place of residence was in a different country. So, you end up having in, in a fair number of the counties, and I’m not exactly sure how many of them, but I’m fairly certain Hidalgo has net out domestic migration. If you’re an international migrant, and let’s say you land in Hidalgo County. And then you move to Bexar County. You’re a domestic migrant. So, the first time you’re an international migrant. You land there, and so you’ve lived in Hidalgo County for two or three years, and then you’re like, well, I have some family or friends up in San Antonio, I’m gonna go live there. Five years ago, you were an international migrant; you know, if you moved two years ago, you’re now a domestic migrant. You have a net outflow of domestic migrants from a fair number of the counties in the Rio Grande Valley. But that’s being offset, and more than offset, by international migration. So we’ve had, you know, this flow of migrants from Mexico, and then Central and South America, and now a bunch of other countries. Of course, that probably has come to a stop now, or is pretty much at a standstill. It’s not like there isn’t any immigration occurring, but certainly unauthorized immigration has slowed, and refugees, what the Census refers to as humanitarian migrants, have really come to a standstill. I mean, it’s just kind of not the flow that we were seeing previously. So I think that is likely to have an impact on many of the counties, because the flow of population growth, or the components of change, is a significant component of international migration. A pretty good part of that has probably been refugees or unauthorized immigrants. Now, that said, there are still a fair number of legal immigrants, because you have a population that’s living in many of these counties that have family members living in Mexico and Central and South America, and they’re able to sponsor their family members to come with visas, and come in legally. So that flow of international migrants, legal immigrants, is likely to continue, but the flow of unauthorized and undocumented immigrants, we’re anticipating that when we start looking again, we’ll look historically a year or two from now, we’ll see that that pretty much came to a standstill with the increased heavy enforcement of the border and kind of the change in the policies in terms of allowing refugee immigrants to come in and stay in the United States.
RGV population is younger than Texas, U.S.
Kristen Mosbrucker-Garza | Rio Grande Valley Business Journal: How has the young population in the RGV influenced our society and economy?
Lloyd Potter | Texas State Demographer: You can probably look at it both as a burden as well as an asset. You have, relatively speaking, higher birth rates and fewer deaths because of the relatively young population. But when you have birth rates that are kind of exceeding the number of deaths, and essentially the age structure becomes younger, simply because you have more births. If you think about a population pyramid, and you’re adding more people at the base of that every year and relatively few people are being subtracted at the top of the population pyramid, then the base gets ever and ever wider. And that’s slowed, as I was just saying, with the declining birth rates. My guess is that median age is starting moving up now in many of the counties in the Valley. Simply because the birth rate has declined, and you have an aging population. Some of the challenges with that are you have a significant proportion of the population that’s living at or close to poverty. And so you have children that are being born into households that are living, you know, certainly not living an affluent lifestyle. They’re kind of living life pretty close to the edge in terms of economic stability; some of them are not really able to get by. So that creates real challenges for providing social services, ensuring that people, that kids have access to food, healthcare. So that’s kind of the challenge.
Lloyd Potter | Texas State Demographer: The positive side is you have this great potential in terms of the labor force. You kind of have young people who are aging up. If you look at South Texas College — I went there and gave a talk at one point – and I was like, boy, they’re doing some amazing things there in terms of training the workforce. I mean, they’re kind of really very strongly engaged with industry, in terms of what their needs are, defining programs that are, you know, focused on trying to create pipelines for those industries. Generally speaking, I say in Texas, we have a strong ethic to work. If we look at the Latino population, I’d say the work ethic is probably really strong, and so you kind of see this huge potential that’s being realized. But certainly, I think there’s a lot more that can be done to realize the potential of the labor force that’s in the Rio Grande Valley, ensuring that the labor force has the skill sets that growing businesses need.
Official RGV population may be underestimated
Kristen Mosbrucker-Garza | Rio Grande Valley Business Journal: How has the undercounting of people during the 2020 Census affected the population estimates of the RGV?
Lloyd Potter | Texas State Demographer: The undercount for the census happens for a number of different reasons. One of them is that people don’t respond. That’s probably the most common one. If we look at the 2020 census, there was an amount of concern, certainly among unauthorized immigrants, about the government coming and knocking on their door, and there was all this stuff about the citizenship question that seemed to raise concern. So I think when we look at the Hispanic [data] I think it was an estimated, like, 4% undercount for Hispanics, or maybe it’s between 4 and 5%. Whereas for the general population in Texas, I think it was like a little more than 1%, like 1.5 or something like that. When I talk about Hispanics, that estimate was national, not just in Texas. But that said, I mean, when you have a sub-segment of the population, Hispanics, that are less likely to be counted in the census, meaning that they’re either not going to answer their door for somebody that knocks on it, they’re not going to fill out a form online, or fill out a piece of paper and submit it. The Census does send out enumerators and knocks on doors, and if they don’t find somebody, then they’ll go and ask a neighbor or somebody that we refer to as a proxy. But again, when you start moving away from a householder, you know, the person living in a household, responding to the Census, versus their neighbor three or four houses down responding. The quality is going to be quite different, and they’re probably not going to be very accurate. And then I think another thing is, and I’m a little less familiar with it, with, I mean, I know that there are colonias in some of the counties that don’t really have good address data. And that’s one of the things the Census Bureau relies on. And so when you have people that are living in housing that’s kind of non-standard, address housing. That makes it more difficult for the Census Bureau to count people, and then you may have households that are kind of complex. And the other thing is children. Children tend to be undercounted. And of course, we were just talking earlier that, you know, the population’s young, so you have, in Rio Grande Valley, so you tend to have, like, low levels of response rates for those households that have young children, or at least the children aren’t getting counted. I think those are all factors that have kind of led to the state having an undercount. But then, if you look at those areas of the state that have high concentrations of population that are Hispanic, high concentrations of the population that are foreign-born, you just see higher non-response rates, and that results in higher undercount.
