Thread: Poverty leaps in El Paso

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Poverty leaps in El Paso

Conditions show work hard to find in El Paso

Darren Meritz
El Paso Times

El Paso's income levels plunged and poverty rates jumped dramatically between 2003 and 2004, Census Bureau estimates released Tuesday indicate.

The statistics bear one truth for job seekers in El Paso: Good work is hard to find.

Juana Arevalo said Tuesday that she's been looking for a job for four months after she lost a job she'd held for five years. Arevalo, 46, was looking for a job in most anything, including work at fast-food restaurants, but said that not even they are hiring.

"It's very hard, and mostly wherever you go they don't have any openings right now. They're not even taking applications," she said. "It's hard, and now you need two people working at all households to barely make ends meet, especially with gas prices right now."

Ignacio Chavira, a father of five children, has a part-time job with Bienvivir, a health services company for seniors, and has been looking for full-time work for eight months. But he said there's little in El Paso for him.

"El Paso is a service city, nothing else. There are no high-paying jobs in El Paso," said Chavira, 42. "It's very difficult because you know the wages are very low, and with people coming from Juárez, you know they have a lot of people to choose from."

The number of El Paso County residents living in poverty rose to 225,974 in 2004, a 19 percent increase from a year earlier, according to the annual American Community Survey released Tuesday by the Census Bureau. The bureau conducts a scientific sample each year of the nation and all cities and counties with more than 250,000 people to produce the estimates of income and poverty.

The figures showed that 32.3 percent of El Paso County residents lived in poverty in 2004, up from 27.4 percent a year earlier. Only Hidalgo and Cameron counties in Texas' Lower Rio Grande Valley had higher poverty rates among the country's urban counties, according to the Census Bureau.

Median household income in El Paso County dropped by more than 6 percent, to $28,925 in 2004 from an inflation adjusted $30,787 a year earlier. Income levels in Texas and the rest of the United States were essentially flat in that period.

Last year was the second consecutive year of declining income and rising poverty levels in El Paso County. An estimated 26.7 percent of the population lived in poverty in 2002, and the county had a median household income of $31,992 when adjusted for inflation.

That means income levels have declined about 10 percent in two years.

State demographer Steve Murdock cited immigration from Mexico as one of a number of complex factors influencing poverty rates and income in El Paso.

"Immigrants, whether you're looking at Irish and Germans 200 years ago or Hispanics today, come in with relatively low levels of education and they take relatively low-level jobs," Murdock said.

Murdock also said that El Paso for decades has struggled with outmigration, a trend in which a segment of the population is leaving a community -- in this case, potentially skilled labor pools.

Median household income for El Pasoans continues to fall short of state and national levels, according to census statistics. El Paso's median household income of $28,925 in 2004 compared with the state's median of $41,759 and the nation's $44,684.

Median income means half of all households make more than that amount and half make less.

A large number of high-school dropouts and economic conditions in Mexico may be primary reasons for El Paso's high poverty and low income, said Tom Fullerton, an economist from the University of Texas at El Paso.

Weak economic conditions in 2001 and 2002 in Mexico might have spurred migration to El Paso, he said, which in turn leads to a larger unskilled work force.

At the same time, high-school dropouts typically don't command high wages, he said.

"People who do not graduate from high school and who do not go on for additional education and training frequently live in poverty," Fullerton said.

Experts said El Paso and other border cities face poverty-breeding conditions that aren't present in other areas.

Border cities often contend with economic factors that push young, educated people away, said Cheryl Howard, a sociologist at UTEP.

At the same time, El Paso has long billed itself as a cheap-labor community and has provided little attraction or pull for recruiting a young, educated work force to the region, she said.

Howard said many El Pasoans possess skills such as foreign language ability and cultural understanding, which are considered commodities in other cities.

"We do continue to have growth, but we have net outmigration of Anglos, and I think we have net outmigration of Hispanics as well," she said. "This pull of Hispanics is only going to increase in the future. They're going to pull -- in other parts of the country -- from our work force."

Besides a large immigrant population, El Paso and other border cities tend to have larger families and more women as heads of households -- all indicators of lower median household income and poverty, Howard said.

Though Census Bureau statistics are indicating a worsening trend for income and poverty, Paso del Norte Health Foundation Chief Executive Officer Ann Pauli said economic developments in the near future could change conditions.

Pauli said transforming Texas Tech University's two-year medical school branch in El Paso into a four-year school will bring El Paso jobs in a growing health-care industry.

Additional soldiers coming to Fort Bliss, along with their family members who would join the local labor force, should also provide El Paso an economic boost in the coming years, Pauli said.

But changing the labor force in the city is not simple, Mayor John Cook said.

Among the city's efforts are initiatives to provide incentives to companies that will bring high-skill jobs to the city -- in particular biotechnology and defense contractors -- while discontinuing incentives such as tax abatements for companies that bring low-skilled labor, Cook said.

"We've got a lot of challenges, we just have to make sure we set our eyes on some achievable goals and keep working on them," Cook said.

Breakdown
Percentage of El Paso County residents living in poverty in 2004, according to American Community Survey data released Tuesday:


Total population: 32.3 percent.

Children under 18: 44.4 percent.

Children under 5: 56.3 percent.

Children living with single mothers: 58.1 percent.

Children living with single fathers: 75.7 percent.

People over 65: 25.2 percent.

Now this sounds like just what our nation needs...more poverty.

What I get sick of is the pussyfooting around. Illegal immigration is destroying all aspects of our society and the idiot media and politicians still sit there and act like they just can't figure out why all of this is happening. They can no longer claim ingnorance of the situation. They know full well why poverty is up, hospitals are closing, disease is on the rise, not to mention the impact on our gas supplies because of thousands of people coming here. Illegals seem to prefer big gas guzzeling trucks.