Small Town in Wyoming Goes Bust in Illustration of Population Shift : Census: Early figures indicate that the heart of the country has lost people to both coasts. Immigrants were a key factor.

On the main street of Rawlins, Wyo., a shoe store, a drug store, a jewelry store and several clothing stores have closed in the last few years. Motel rooms go vacant, tract houses stand empty, restaurants struggle to stay open and the residents of the dusty little city see their children grow up and leave to find jobs elsewhere.

“We have hit what we think is bottom,” city attorney David Clark said.

In 10 years, Rawlins has ridden to the top of a fuel and mining boom and skidded to the depths of a bust. The population, once 14,500, fell by more than a third.

And so when the Census Bureau released preliminary 1990 figures recently, the numbers confirmed what Clark and his neighbors see daily--a city on the losing side of a dramatic population shift. They know about the lives behind the data spinning out of Census Bureau computers.

They reduce to statistics some of the dramatic developments of the last decade: economic decline and misery in some parts of the country and burgeoning development in others, a stunning wave of immigration, an aging population moving to popular retirement spots and young families going beyond the suburbs in search of affordable housing.

The data are the first trickle of what will become a mass of new information about the country, garnered from the laborious decennial census conducted this spring and summer. Although census officials cautioned that many of these preliminary nationwide numbers will change in final tabulations late this year, the early figures confirm that the heart of the country is hollowing out and the nationwide population of about 250 million is becoming concentrated on the coasts.

The population losses in Rawlins and other rural communities reflect the economic hardships of farmers, coal and uranium miners, oil workers and small-scale rural manufacturers, including farm equipment and lumber mills. And the surge of metropolitan growth in the face of rural declines indicates an end to the “rural renaissance” of the 1970s.

Wyoming, for example, lost more than 4% of its population, while West Virginia’s declined 8.6% and Iowa lost 5.1%.

“It clearly means there was a greater degree of out-migration than had been expected,” said Calvin Beale, a demographer at the Agriculture Department. “Basically, it is economic.”

The numbers also show the significance of immigrants, who accounted for perhaps 40% of the nation’s growth over the decade.

In Brownsville, Tex., for example, where census figures show growth of nearly 13%--officials say it is closer to 18%--the public schools cannot keep up with the flood of new immigrants.

“We take in over 2,000 kids new to the system from south of the border every year,” said Alejandro Perez, supervisor for admissions. “It’s almost a new school coming in per year. We’re building all the time.”

The numbers are felt in the everyday duties of Perez’s colleagues: More and more bilingual teachers are hired, officials deal with the poor educational backgrounds of many of the immigrant children and the city faces the costly proposition of supporting a quickly expanding school system.

Jeffrey Passell, a demographer at the Urban Institute, said that foreigners settling in the upper Midwest and Northeast also kept several states--such as New York, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Massachusetts--from losing population or kept losses at half of what they would have been otherwise.

The numbers reflect other trends:

Cape Cod and the Ozark Mountains of northwestern Arkansas gained more population than was expected, demographers say, because more and more people are retiring in those areas.

Washington state gained 16.8%, at least in part because of what one social scientist called “suburban Angst ,” middle-class families disenchanted with the suburbs in California moving to the open spaces of the Pacific Northwest.

The most dramatic growth was in California, where the population rose nearly 24% since 1980. The influx pushed cities such as San Diego and San Jose into the ranks of the major metropolises. In some cases, the figures suggest the rise of a new economy built under near-sweatshop conditions by immigrants willing to work for low wages in clothing and electronics factories.

The statistics for some Southern California communities are stunning. Cathedral City in Riverside County grew by more than 600%, to nearly 29,000 residents from just over 4,000 a decade ago.

In Victorville, a once-sleepy community in the high desert about 90 miles from downtown Los Angeles, the population shot to nearly 39,500 from 14,220 in 1980. Here the census numbers paint an increasingly typical picture: A young couple moves far out of the city to find an affordable house, then sets up life on a landscape of new tracts with few trees and drives more than two hours to and from jobs in the city.

City planner John Hnatek described an army of crews laying sewer pipes and hanging traffic lights to keep up with the growth: “We have people who come up once a month, and every time they come up they see something new they haven’t seen before,” he said.

With this extraordinary growth comes political clout. California is expected to gain seven seats in the House, for a delegation of 52 and an unprecedented opportunity to dominate Congress.

Alan Heslop, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, said the new seats may act as a “steam valve” for ethnic communities by allowing minorities more chances to win elective office at national and state levels.

Heslop and others predicted that, as minorities find representation in state legislatures and in Congress, they will focus more on the issues they consider important--education, access to jobs and immigration policy.

New regional tensions may emerge. The debate over the infrastructure, for example, could increasingly become a competition between the Sun Belt, which will need funds for new highways, and the so-called Rust Belt, which has long needed to repair old highways.

Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. cautioned, however, that such projections are often overdrawn.

“As population goes, so do problems go,” he said. He predicted that the blossoming cities of the South and West will soon care about the issues that predominate in New York and Detroit--crime, education, solid waste disposal and welfare, for example.

Also, the conservatism of high-growth areas may be mitigated with a dose of reality, he said. “As these problems rise in the South and Southwest, the need for affirmative government to deal with the problems will also rise,” Schlesinger said.