Chen019
September 23, 2011, 1:14am
1
Interesting analysis shows the unemployment rate and the employment rate show a deterioration in the Texas for the native-born that was similar to the rest of the country.
Governor Rick Perry (R-Texas) has pointed to job growth in Texas during the current economic downturn as one of his main accomplishments. But analysis of Current Population Survey (CPS) data collected by the Census Bureau show that immigrants (legal and illegal) have been the primary beneficiaries of this growth since 2007, not native-born workers. This is true even though the native-born accounted for the vast majority of growth in the working-age population (age 16 to 65) in Texas. Thus, they should have received the lion’s share of the increase in employment. As a result, the share of working-age natives in Texas holding a job has declined in a manner very similar to the nation a whole.
Among the findings:
•Of jobs created in Texas since 2007, 81 percent were taken by newly arrived immigrant workers (legal and illegal).
While that’s interesting, I can’t see Obama using this data, as much of his base might find it distasteful. Bachmann or Palin might, though.
Chen019
September 23, 2011, 2:04am
3
ShibbOleth:
While that’s interesting, I can’t see Obama using this data, as much of his base might find it distasteful. Bachmann or Palin might, though.
True, although I was interested to see that Paul Krugman actually touched on this point a month ago.
For this much is true about Texas: It has, for many decades, had much faster population growth than the rest of America — about twice as fast since 1990. Several factors underlie this rapid population growth: a high birth rate, immigration from Mexico, and inward migration of Americans from other states, who are attracted to Texas by its warm weather and low cost of living, low housing costs in particular.
…But what does population growth have to do with job growth? Well, the high rate of population growth translates into above-average job growth through a couple of channels. Many of the people moving to Texas — retirees in search of warm winters, middle-class Mexicans in search of a safer life — bring purchasing power that leads to greater local employment. At the same time, the rapid growth in the Texas work force keeps wages low — nearly 10 percent of hourly Texan workers earn the minimum wage or less, well above the national average — and these low wages give corporations an incentive to move production to the Lone Star State.
So Texas tends, in good years and bad, to have higher job growth than the rest of America. But it needs lots of new jobs just to keep up with its rising population — and as those unemployment comparisons show, recent employment growth has fallen well short of what’s needed…
Still, does Texas job growth point the way to faster job growth in the nation as a whole? No.
What Texas shows is that a state offering cheap labor and, less important, weak regulation can attract jobs from other states. I believe that the appropriate response to this insight is “Well, duh.” The point is that arguing from this experience that depressing wages and dismantling regulation in America as a whole would create more jobs — which is, whatever Mr. Perry may say, what Perrynomics amounts to in practice — involves a fallacy of composition: every state can’t lure jobs away from every other state.
ShibbOleth:
While that’s interesting, I can’t see Obama using this data, as much of his base might find it distasteful. Bachmann or Palin might, though.
A politician would only be able to fairly use this factoid if Texas received proportionally less immigrants than the other states.
But who says politics is fair?
Oh, goodie! More cites from the anti-immigration think tank. Here’s more on Steven Camarota :
This week also marks nine years (September 16, 2002, to be precise) since Steven A. Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies (a group cited by Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik in his “manifesto”) had an article published in the National Review, in which he foresees the future of the United States…
It is in the last four paragraphs that Camarota finally gets around to his main argument: reducing/restricting immigration. He claims doing so is the only way to ensure that hordes of new terrorists don’t come flooding into the US; however, while he would like to see a return to pre-1965 days, when certain areas of the world were allocated less green cards than others, he admits that “our equality-obsessed society” makes this impossible.
Who actually believes this stuff? Beyond Chen019 & Anders Breivik, that is?