Our friends at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) really think Rick Perry is bad news on immigration policy. First we had Mark Krikorian risking his Immigration “Beard” status at NRO to explicitly denounce Perry as an Amnesty supporter, then his colleague Ronald Mortensen exhaustively demonstrated Mitt Romney’s superiority to Perry on immigration issues. Now Steve Camarota has come up with Who Benefited from Job Growth In Texas?

• Of jobs created in Texas since 2007, 81 percent were taken by newly arrived immigrant workers (legal and illegal)…
• 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)… even though natives made up most of the growth in potential workers, most of the job growth went to immigrants
• 
  Of newly arrived immigrants who took jobs in Texas since 2007, we estimate that 50 percent (113,000) were illegal immigrants. Thus, about 40 percent of all the job growth in Texas since 2007 went to newly arrived illegal immigrants and 40 percent went to newly arrived legal immigrants.

This of course is consistent with Ed Rubenstein’s consistent findings about immigrants winning the lion’s share of recent American job growth. Presumably this is because they are cheaper (especially if off the books).

Why Governor Perry deserves much credit for recent Texas comparative prosperity escapes me – it is clearly oil and more particularly oil-tool driven (the Houston area’s dominance in the world oil tool business is amazing). But his careless attitude to the immigration inundation of the state does have something to do with lack of wage growth as distinct from employment growth in the Texas, as David Frum has said. See
David Frum On Rick Perry:"Why Have Labor Laws Gone So Badly Enforced? In Very Large Part: Because Rick Perry’s Donors Don’t Want Them Enforced."