AUSTIN – A paper published last Friday by the Texas Public Policy Foundation addresses a recent claim by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) that 81 percent of new Texas jobs during the last four years had gone to newly arrived immigrants. The paper, “The Texas Model: Who Really Gets Texas Jobs,” was written by Chuck DeVore, a visiting senior fellow in the Foundation’s Center for Fiscal Policy.
“Put simply, CIS…compared a net increase in jobs in Texas over a four-year period with a gross increase in employed newly arrived immigrants in Texas,” DeVore wrote on NationalReview.com this morning. “This is truly an apples-to-oranges comparison; it is as if a report claimed that Google is a larger company than Apple because its market capitalization of $162 billion exceeds Apple’s annual revenues of $100 billion.”
Total employment in Texas increased by approximately 279,000 during the four years analyzed in the CIS report. However, an accumulation of monthly data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals that Texas actually created 5,627,328 new jobs while shedding 5,348,238 jobs during that period.
“All we can tell from the numbers is that the 225,000 immigrants in the CIS study were holding that same number of the 15 million jobs filled and the 5.6 million new jobs at the time of the Current Population Survey (CPS) conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau,” DeVore wrote in the TPPF paper. “In fact, they could have held and lost more than one job during the last four years. The immigrants almost get lost in this churn.”
The effect of extended unemployment benefits, skill sets of newly arrived Texans, and high rates of immigrant small-business formation are cited in the TPPF paper as complicating an analysis of the actual share of Texas job growth that went to immigrants.
“TPPF contends that Texas’s record of job creation is due to low state spending and taxes, a predictable, low level of regulation, and strong property-rights protection, a sound civil-justice system, and minimal dependence on – or interference from – the federal government,” DeVore concluded his NRO column. “These policies benefit Texans, as well as people who decide to move to Texas from other states and from other countries.”
Chuck DeVore is a visiting senior fellow in the Center for Fiscal Policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He served in the California State Assembly from 2004 to 2010, where he was vice chairman of the Assembly Committee on Revenue and Taxation.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation is a non-profit, free-market research institute based in Austin.
Primary website: www.TexasPolicy.com Facebook page: www.Facebook.com/TexasPublicPolicyFoundation Twitter feed: www.Twitter.com/TPPF
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