Rick Perry's Texas: Since 2007, 81% of jobs created taken by newly arrived immigrants

And the punchline is ..... that half of that 81% where illegals. So 40% of jobs created in Texas went to illegals and not citizens of Texas.

The following are excerps from a newly released 2011 Study by the Center for Immigration Studies:

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.

The findings include:

• Of jobs created in Texas since 2007, 81 percent were taken by newly arrived immigrant workers (legal and illegal).

• In terms of numbers, between the second quarter of 2007, right before the recession began, and the second quarter of 2011, total employment in Texas increased by 279,000. Of this, 225,000 jobs went to immigrants (legal and illegal) who arrived in the United States in 2007 or later.

• Of newly arrived immigrants who took a job in Texas, 93 percent were not U.S. citizens. Thus government data show that more than three-fourths of net job growth in Texas were taken by newly arrived non-citizens (legal and illegal).

Part of the Conclusion of the study:

...These figures do not settle the debate over the economics of immigration. What they do show is that high immigration can go hand in hand with very negative labor market outcomes for the native-born. And conversely the native-born can do relatively well in areas of lower immigration.

There is a long and complex debate among economists about whether the native-born population benefits economically from immigration, which cannot be settled here. There is also significant debate about whether the impact of immigration can be measured by comparing different parts of the country that have varying levels of immigration. What we can say about Texas is that there has been significant job growth in the state since 2007, and that immigrants (particularly newly arrived non-citizens) were the primary beneficiaries of this growth. This is an important finding and should be part of any discussion of the performance of the Texas economy.

Read the complete findings of the study HERE.

Please check us out on Facebook and If you like what you see, please "Like" us. You can find us here.