Sure – If Mitt takes down his smear website on Perry with his lies about Texas job growth.

Romney?s claim is based on a September report from the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that advocates for lower immigration. According to the report, ?Of jobs created in Texas since 2007, 81 percent were taken by newly arrived immigrant workers (legal and illegal).? And, the report states: ?Of newly arrived immigrants who took jobs in Texas since 2007, we estimate that 50 percent (113,000) were illegal immigrants. Thus, about 40 percent of all the job growth in Texas since 2007 went to newly arrived illegal immigrants and 40 percent went to newly arrived legal immigrants.?

But just as Perry said, the study has come under fire from some who claim it is based on flawed methodology.

Pia Orrenius, an economist and immigration expert at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, told the Dallas Morning News the methodology is ?misleading? because, ?[y]ou?re comparing gross inflows to net job creation. You have to compare net to net.?

Chuck DeVore, a visiting senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, also wrote an analysis critical of the CIS study:

DeVore: Put simply, CIS compared a net increase in jobs in Texas over a four year period with a gross increase in employed newly arrived immigrants in Texas. This is truly an apples to oranges comparison that should be thought of in the same way as if a report claimed that Google is a larger company that Apple because its market capitalization of $162 billion exceeded Apple?s annual revenues of $100 billion.

CIS stands by its study, but one of the study?s authors, Steven Camarota, told us if people prefer the ?net to net? figures, those are included in the CIS study as well. And those figures are much more modest than the numbers given by Romney in the debate. Since the second quarter of 2007, the employment of foreign-born immigrants in Texas increased by 150,000 compared with an increase in employment for native-born workers of 130,000. By that calculation, immigrants counted for 54 percent of the net increase ? not 81 percent.

DeVore called that ?a more supportable contention? and an ?apples to apples comparison.?

But not all of those immigrants were illegal immigrants. Camarota said he did not have figures on how many of that 54 percent were illegal immigrants, but he said, ?I would guess it?s less than half.? That puts the percentage of job growth taken by illegal immigrants somewhere closer to 20 percent, he said. That?s still a ?very big number,? Camarota said. But it?s a far cry from the ?nearly half? cited by Romney.