SHELBYVILLE, Tenn. – When the wind blows just the right way, the overpowering smell of the chicken business – housing, slaughtering and processing – wafts across Shelbyville’s town square, past Bedford County’s historic courthouse and the benches where locals sit, grab a smoke and talk about life in town. The pungent smell is a powerful reminder of just how central the poultry industry is to this Middle Tennessee town, population 19,477. Since buying the facility in 1972, Tyson Foods Inc. has not only processed and packaged 67 million birds a year and provided 1,200 of the area’s jobs. It has also reshaped Shelbyville’s population. And the talk among the locals these days is how that population has been reworked yet again as part of the new immigrant wave. During more than 50 years of operation under various owners, the plant at first hired whites, then African-Americans and later Hispanics. But it’s the newest group of workers – Muslim Somalian refugees hailing from a politically unstable and war-torn East African nation – who this month pushed the town into the national spotlight. And it brought Shelbyville’s discomfort with its latest population change sharply into focus. In Shelbyville, […]