Perry’s Ambiguous Employment Record
Who benefited from job growth in Texas?

National Review Online
Steven A. Camarota
September 22, 2011 5:00 P.M.

Texas governor Rick Perry has pointed to job growth in Texas during the current economic downturn as one of his main accomplishments. But in a new report for the Center for Immigration Studies, based on data collected monthly by the Census Bureau, we found that newly arrived immigrants (legal and illegal) have been the primary beneficiaries of this growth between 2007 and 2011, not native-born workers.

We found that of jobs created in Texas since 2007, 81 percent (225,000) were taken by newly arrived foreign workers (legal and illegal). The Census Bureau asks immigrants to say when they came to the United States, so it is easy to look at new arrivals who took jobs. Of newly arrived immigrants who took a job in Texas, the data show that 93 percent were not U.S. citizens. We estimate that about half of newly arrived immigrants who took jobs in Texas since 2007 were illegal immigrants. This means that about 40 percent of all the job growth in Texas between 2007 and 2011 went to newly arrived illegal immigrants and 40 percent went to newly arrived legal immigrants.

What is so surprising about these numbers is that so much of the job growth in the state went to immigrants even though the native-born accounted for 69 percent of the growth in Texas’s working-age population (16 to 65). Put another way, even though natives made up most of the growth in potential workers, most of the job growth went to immigrants. As a result, the employment rate for natives — the share of working-age natives holding a job in the state — declined in a manner very similar to that seen in the rest of the country. This is an indication that the situation for native-born workers in Texas is very similar to that of the nation as a whole, despite the state’s job growth.

The employment rate declined significantly, from 71.1 percent in 2007 to 66.6 percent in 2011. In my view, and that of many labor economists, the decline in the employment rate is more troubling than the rise in the unemployment rate. Unemployment counts only those who have looked for work in the last four weeks. It does not include those who have not looked recently, nor does it include those who have given up looking for work.

Now, I realize that there is always the post-national perspective held by some libertarians that says, “Who cares who gets the jobs?â€