NJ Education Aid published some of its excellent, data-driven work in NJ Education Report, this time focusing on the hard numbers about NJ’s outmigration problem. These facts are important in and of themselves because NJ policy-makers should recognize that NJ is losing the competition with other states for people, wealth and businesses. But these facts are also important because they expose oft-cited New Jersey Policy Perspective (NJPP) as ignoring these facts and pushing their own (false) narrative.
There are three main takeaways:
- NJ has an outmigration problem. Even with foreign immigration, it is losing population, and when compared to other states, NJ has one of the very worst outmigrations. NJ is going to have a very difficult time meeting its future obligations if its population is shrinking.
- NJPP wrongly asserted that NJ has had an outmigration problem for a long time. In fact, NJ’s serious outmigration problem is a 21st century phenomenon.
- NJPP wrongly asserted that the whole northeast has outmigration and NJ is only part of that. The facts show that NJ’s outmigration is severe even among northeastern states. Only NY’s is worse and NJ and NY stand apart from the others when it comes to the severity of the problem.
NJ’s policy-makers must come to grips with the reality of outmigration and takes steps to address the problem. In so doing, they should ignore NJPP’s happy-talk narrative because it is false. Thank you, NJ Education Aid.