Marion County’s Growing Hispanic Workforce

December 12, 2024

Marion County’s Hispanic workforce has grown significantly over the past three decades. In 1992, a little more than 7,600 workers in Marion County were Hispanic, comprising 7% of Marion County’s workforce. In 2024, nearly 34,000 workers in Marion County are Hispanic, comprising 20% of the county’s workforce.

Statewide, Hispanic workers comprised 4% of Oregon’s workforce in 1992. In 2024, Hispanic workers make up 14% of the state’s workforce.

In the fourth quarter of 1991, more than three out of five (63%) Hispanic workers in Marion County worked in agriculture and manufacturing. That compares with 17% of Marion County’s non-Hispanic workers that worked in the agriculture and manufacturing sectors in 1991. 

Over the next three decades as Marion County’s Hispanic workforce grew, much of that job growth occurred in industries other than agriculture and manufacturing. In the fourth quarter of 2023, only 21% of Hispanics working in Marion County worked in agriculture or manufacturing, down from 63% in 1991. By 2023, the industry employing the most Hispanic workers was health care and social assistance, where 19% of Marion County’s Hispanic workers were employed. In 1991, only 5% of Hispanic workers in Marion County worked in health care and social assistance. Health care and social assistance was also the industry employing the most non-Hispanic workers; 19% of non-Hispanic workers in Marion County worked in health care and social assistance in 2023, matching the share of Hispanic workers in that industry.

As Marion County’s Hispanic workforce has grown over the past three decades, Hispanic workers now work in a broad number of industries compared with thirty years ago when Hispanic workers were very concentrated in the agriculture and manufacturing sectors.