North America's meatpackers have relied upon immigrants to staff their plants from the earliest days of the industry in the late nineteenth century when packinghouses were located in urban areas adjacent to stockyards. A hundred years later the industry remains dependent on an immigrant labor force, but now most of its plants are located in rural areas. This means rural communities are transformed with the arrival of immigrants to staff their plants. But Canada and the United States have different immigration policies, which means they draw upon different immigrant sources. Canada favors the recruitment of highly skilled labor while the United States emphasizes family reunification. This paper examines whether this difference affects the labor force composition of a Canadian and U.S. meatpacking plant, and the associated transformation of the plants' host communities.

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Interpersonal attributes are used to explain the regional travel behavior and cognitive maps of a sample of Eastern Illinois adolescents. It is found that less‐than‐average travel within the local region is characteristic of adolescents who are female, who drive infrequently, and who reside in a high‐order town. Further, limited travel at the regional scale correlated with highly inaccurate cognitive maps. Finally, female gender and infrequent car use correlate with confusion about inter‐town distances above and beyond their association with small home range.

The dominant paradigms in contemporary Canadian inner-city research have been documenting the influx of well-educated professionals into select inner-city neighbourhoods and the distinctiveness of Canadian cities from their US counterparts. These approaches have ignored the role of structural economic change in producing high levels of unemployment as manufacturing jobs have left the inner city. This paper measures the relative strength of these opposing forces within the Canadian urban system by examining changes in inner-city deprivation levels between 1981 and 1991 for the 22 largest cities. The study found evidence of increasing divergence in deprivation levels at the inter-city and intra-city levels but these could not be attributed to structural economic change; instead, local factors appear to be major determinants of overall inner-city conditions.