How many jobs went to undocumented workers hired illegally?
Was it hundreds of thousands for whom a minimum wage job in Texas provided a princely sum to children and spouses living much cheaper back home in Mexico? The answer evidently is a clear 'YES'!
WHAT'S YOUR OPINION?
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In MSNBC's wrapup of the Republican "debate" tonight, Lawrence O'Donnell remarked that 300,000 of the "million" jobs Perry bragged about "creating" tonight were government jobs, mainly funded by President Obama's stimulus spending on grants to local governments. Like other backward states, Texas has scores of counties. But Texas is the champion of wasteful duplication in government, with 254 counties, more than any other state (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_counties_in_Texas )! Thus Texas had many more bites at the stimulus apple than any other state; a major portion of the jobs Perry touts were due directly to Texas backwardness and aggressive pursuit of stimulus dollars.
Another unique attribute of the state of Texas is its long border with Mexico, a country with much cheaper living standards than the average US jurisdiction. I wondered how much of the "Texas miracle" may have come from undocumented Mexican workers who cross the long Texas border for months or years at a time to be hired illegally by Texas employers and to send money home to support their families.
I googled 'remittances" +"from Texas" +"to Mexico"' and was amazed by the number of "hits" I got. One of the best was one of many newspaper article about a mean-spirited Republican-proposed state law that would add an 8 percent tax on remittances to Mexico (but not to Canada or other predominantly Caucasian countries)! See
http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_17614769 .
The statistic that caught my eye here was that an estimated $4.3 billion in remittances were sent from Texas to Mexico and Latin America in the most recent year for which the Inter-American Development Bank could provide data (evidently 2006).
In 2009, the US minimum wage reached $7.25 an hour, or $14,500 for a 2,000-hour work year. Dividing $14,500 into $4.3 billion yields about 300,000 full-time minimum wage jobs. Living expenses in Texas would eat up at least half of those paychecks, so the number of Texas workers sending remittances home to Mexico and points south would have to have been at least 600,000. If all jobs were not 2,000 hours a year, that 600,000 would have to rise.
I have not yet found substantial time-series data on remittances from Texas to Mexico from the end of the Perry predecessor Governor George W. Bush era (in Y2K) to the present. But I did find an estimate that such remittances had risen 64 percent from 2004 to 2006 (see
http://www.chron.com/business/article/Texas-Hispanic-immigrants-send-billions-home-1492876.php ). This represents just two years of Perry's almost eleven-year regime.
Thus apparently hundreds of thousands of the "million" jobs Perry takes credit for "creating" are due to increasingly porous borders on his watch as Governor. Added to the 300,000 jobs Texas's hundreds of counties took from President Obama's stimulus, this means that most of what Perry is touting is not due to any superior business climate Perry fostered, but rather to backwardness in government structure and head-in-sand attention to unlawful employer hiring of the undocumented under Governor Perry!
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