Richard Florida argues that capital has been over invested in housing in Canada to the detriment of labor mobility. This is a similar argument to Western Australia having a booming economy and no-one from the Eastern States wanting to move out there. All of Western Australia's population growth has been from immigrants and in-state births. Florida writes:

... cities with higher rates of home ownership also have higher unemployment - in Europe, a 10-per-cent rise in the former corresponds with a 2-per-cent rise in the latter.

What's the link? The simple fact that anyone who has invested in a house is less likely to pack up and leave when times get tough.

In 2008, fewer Americans moved, as a percentage of the population, than in any year since the U.S. Census Bureau started tracking changes of address in the late 1940s: less than 12 per cent versus more than 20 during suburbia's golden years. ...

Yet this is the absolute worst time for people to lose the ability to move around.

This is more the classical economic argument that people should move to where the jobs are. Florida's argument in his book the Creative Class is the opposite. His research suggests that people choose a location for reasons other than work and then business has to move to find this creative class and use their intellectual capital.

Florida argues that people choose a city for its art, culture, hiking, cycling, schools, etc with its economy as an after thought. However, the areas that have a lot of the former, like New York City, Washington DC, San Francisco, also tend to have interesting high tech economies.

So it is kind of contradictory to read Florida's housing argument in opposition to his Creative Class thesis.

Arizona recently passed 1070, a law on policing immigration on the Arizona-Mexico border that has caused a great deal of division in Arizona and the United States because of its demand for a form of profiling and how it allows arbitrary policing of the law. An additional issue is that it requires papers to be carried proving immigration or citizenship status by nearly all who will be profiled - which includes Australian permanent residents with funny accents.

I have been stopped by Border Patrol on Rt.8 and asked to prove I am here legally. The Border Patrol are normally of Hispanic decent anyway and do not care if being Australian has a romantic flair to it in America. An Australian ex-pat is just another suspicious non-American to deal with. I think 1070 is a bad law that directly attacks freedom of movement. It should be repealed in its current form.

Arizona solved the people staying put in their houses and dealt with a booming construction market through illegal immigration and temporary workers from Mexico. Most of those that came across during the boom have gone home now that Arizona is in the dumps of recession. It was done with a wink and nod, it was known that it was happening, and the construction and landscaping companies were happy for the regular flow of cheap, skilled labor to meet demand in construction projects.

It seems like a good way to deal with the issue of people not moving from their community once they become invested in it with the purchase of a house and their labor becoming immobile. Immigration is important, both of unskilled and skilled, as it will more readily move to the current hot-spot economy in the country than those who have settled down and taken out a mortgage.

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