The current legislative and more public media debate over immigration reform has increased
public awareness of Hispanic population growth and two important trends: the aging the nonHispanic
U.S. population, and the increasing unwillingness of native-born residents to take
undesirable jobs at their current wage levels. This attention on Hispanic influence in recent years
has been motivated, in part, by the appearance of rapidly growing Hispanic populations in
unexpected places, particularly nonmetropolitan counties outside of the Southwest. The
diversity of new rural areas of destination raises questions about forces attracting migrants to
areas outside of the Southwest. While much of the public and legislative debate on immigration
emphasizes the supply side of the labor market for foreign-born workers, this paper takes an
alternative approach and considers some of the forces in American industry that have altered the
demand side of the labor market. This paper uses a case study to illustrate how economic forces
within an industrial sector can influence immigrant population growth. We examine trends in
meat consumption and the resultant structural changes in the meat processing industry including
consolidation, vertical integration, and concentration. We show how these trends have
contributed to the increasing tendency for firms to locate plants in rural areas of the Midwest and
Southeast and employ growing numbers of foreign-born workers. Our results highlight the role
of industrial transformations in the meat processing industry for understanding Hispanic
migration to new geographic destinations in the United States.