http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2011/07/real-secret-behind-texas-economic-boom.html
Brilliant observation, and true: What’s the secret ingredient to Texas’ much-ballyhooed job creation boom that you’ll never hear from Rick Perry on the presidential campaign stump? Drug Trafficking, says Joe Tone at the Dallas Observer’s Unfair Park blog, offering this quote first reported by Tina Rosenberg in New York magazine:
Jack Schumacher, a recently retired Texas-based DEA agent, says that at least half the drug shipments coming from Mexico stop and offload in Texas. The product is repackaged in small units and resold at a considerable markup, with a share of the gross staying in the state. Even some of the money that gets expatriated to Mexico winds up back in Texas, laundered through Mexican currency exchanges. The state’s relative security is the draw. “If you have a few million,” says Schumacher, “would you invest in a war zone or a bank in San Antonio?” The DEA warns that traffickers are cleaning up their proceeds by buying businesses in South Texas. They also spend on guns, warehouses, security guards—and on luxury cars and houses. “In San Antonio, a high-dollar trafficker can buy a $2 million or $3 million place and exist for a long time,” he adds.
Further, adds Rosenberg:
Mexicans in Texas are hardly new, but in recent years it’s middle- and upper-class families in Mexico’s north who have also made the exodus, bringing their savings and businesses with them. While most seem to be fleeing the kidnapping and extortion back home, one observer has a different take: “Some people, including me, suspect that some of these people come with funds from the drug trade,” says Michael Lauderdale, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Texas.
