You may have seen some recent coverage about New Jersey’s jobless rate — one of the highest in the country behind only California and Washington DC. But the story is a little more complex than that, with a lot of variation throughout the state. Ryan Ellis is an economist at Seton Hall University.
“You have the two sort of metro anchors that are not actually in the state of New Jersey but the New York and Philly metros spill over into the state, and those parts of New Jersey that are kind of contained or nearby to those metros are about the national average for unemployment or even a bit below,” said Ellis.
Ellis said the areas of highest unemployment tend to be in South Jersey, with part of the reason being the seasonal nature of work in counties along the Jersey Shore.
In general though, he said the high jobless rate is really not news.
“Just looking at the past 10 years or so if you look at average unemployment for every state for every year New Jersey is in and around the top 10 most of the time,” he said.
Ellis said recent federal government initiatives may play a part here too.
“We have for instance a really high population of immigrants in New Jersey, essentially a quarter of the state is foreign born, and if something like immigration enforcement has a chilling effect on employment for a large chunk of the population maybe you see that reflected in the figures,” he said.