Eddy and Lea Counties and Metro Abq Lead September Wage Job Growth

New Mexico continued a strong job performance in the year from September 2017 to September 2018. The state added 19,600 wage jobs for a 2.3% increase over the year.
The Department of Workforce Services released detailed September job numbers late this afternoon in its Labor Market Review newsletter.
Metro Albuquerque kept pace with the state, scoring 2.3% wage job growth for the year, the result of 9,000 new jobs. The Albuquerque performance was good for 46% of the state’s net new wage jobs.
Job growth in the state’s other three metro areas shuffled along with Farmington the unlikely “hot spot,” reporting 1.2% growth (600 jobs), Las Cruces with 0.4% growth (300 jobs) and no change in Santa Fe’s job levels for the year.
Te real growth was in Eddy and Lea counties, both back to booming with Permian Basin oil and gas production. For the counties we must count “employment,” which is a bit different from wage jobs, but close enough for our purposes. Eddy County employment was 30,244 during September 2018. That’s 9% growth for the September to September year and an employment increase of 2,506. Lea County employment grew by 2,353, a 9.1% increase to 28,127.
Combined, metro Albuquerque and Lea and Eddy counties grabbed 71% of the year-over-year growth.
A curiosity is that, statewide, mining (and logging) show a one-year of a mere 100 jobs. Go figure.
The growing sectors across the state were leisure and hospitality (+5,100 or 5.2%), professional and business services (+4,300 or 4.1%) and construction (+3,700 or 8%).
Professional and business services (+4,200 or 6.9%) led the metro Albuquerque year-over-year growth, followed by construction (+1,200 or 5.1%). Note that the professional and business services growth outside Albuquerque was 100 jobs.
In the newsletter, DWS passed along some demographic estimates for 2017 from the Census Bureau.
At 48.8% Hispanic, New Mexico isn’t quite a majority Hispanic, but is much more Hispanic than the nation which is 18.1% Hispanic. We are also 3.5 percentage points more “white only,” 75.8% to 72.3%.
A compared to the nation, New Mexico is a bit younger, with both more children under 14 and more adults over 65.
We move less often than does the rest of the nation, but it seems that the people who do move were born in New Mexico. Natives to the state (meaning people born in New Mexico) comprise 53.4% of New Mexicans as compared to 58.2% of the nation. It’s those young families who leave seeking opportunity and the rest resting on the claimed wisdom of centuries of family residence.