Texas employment tops 14M as state job growth tops U.S.

In a large enough geography there can of course be both dynamics at play.

If a place's population increased and the impoverished population shot up, then, at first, it would give me pause that perhaps people were getting stuck there. It wouldn't be the first time that brain drain happened in advance of urban retooling and job loss. Witness the great brain drain from the rural US into inner city manufacturing neighborhoods while factory jobs were already beginning to leave those city centers. The successful cities of England's North endured something similar at the same postwar moment in their much longer history.

That Texas keeps showing this behavior of parallel growth in popularity and poverty for decades on end, though, makes much more explanatory the latter idea -- that e.g. metropolitan San Antonio is popular and a ladder for the underdogs of both the American economy and several Central American ones. California had a very similar and bipartisan growth dynamic in the 1910s-1980s before some Californians started pulling up the ladder behind them. Would be interesting to see a trajectory of housing costs near job growth in that state over time and whether land offers Texas any real buffer against such a trajectory.

What, specifically, is bad about the business climate in California? And I'm talking about things that can't be easily refuted with basic facts.

Speculating on effectiveness of the DA and how much crime goes unreported would have to benchmark other cities to be meaningful. We can’t just assume that crime is more frequently reported and prosecuted elsewhere based on a joke headline.

Ironically, SF’s property crime problem is likely heavily impacted by the high demand to live there in the first place and the resulting high cost of housing. SF can alleviate crime by building housing, but I’m not sure how Peoria, IL, Steubenville, OH, or Bridgeport, CT solve their crime and drug issues long term. At least SF has a clear path out.

Inspecting the original document should be a high enough bar for verification (assuming the employer isn’t knowingly trying to subvert the system). E-verify exists to provide an alternative to inspecting the physical document.

But in reality I’m guessing most small employers take shortcuts and don’t inspect the documents as they should or don’t keep records of I-9 at all (the form is very rarely needed for anything)