For all the air defenders left on Ft. Bliss here is an interesting fact about the economic impact that the base expansion has created for El Paso:

The news coming out of dusty border city El Paso, Texas, is usually pretty grim. The metro suffers from 9.5% unemployment, declining high-school graduation rates and inadequate infrastructure. But a closer look reveals an employment picture that, at least in one way, is improving. In the past four years, incomes for college graduates there have steadily grown more than any other major metropolitan area.

Several factors, like increased border patrol activity requiring jobs in intelligence and other white-collar work, and recent expansions of both Fort Bliss, one of the country’s largest military bases, and the local University of Texas campus, have boosted pay for educated Texans. Couple that with El Paso’s relative protection from the battered housing economy and it’s easier to see why pay is inching up.

“Under most circumstances, it would be surprising for El Paso to rank so highly on any type of income gauge,” says Tom Fullerton, economics professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. “But there has been some really fortunate timing in terms of expansion in the local economy.”

Indeed, it’s not always the most affluent or economically robust cities where incomes for professionals have jumped the most, according to data provided by Seattle-based Payscale, an online provider of employee compensation data with a database of 18.5 million employee profiles. Median pay rose in El Paso by 19.4% to $49,100 since 2005, handily outpacing the 8% national growth for college grads.

Closely following El Paso are Bakersfield, Calif., an oil town packed with engineers, where incomes are up 18.5%; Omaha, Neb., a national center for large insurance carriers like Mutual of Omaha, which saw an 18.4% jump; and Virginia Beach, Va., home to U.S. military bases including Naval Air Station Oceana, where the median rose 17.3%.  [Yahoo Finance]