Multiple COPY statements

Does anyone have experience or advice on how to efficiently issue a
large number of COPY statements? The data (US Census) comes in > 100
"segments" (each will be copied to its own database tables) for each
state (51), for a total of > 5000 text files. I can generate the COPY
statements with a script.

The two specific question I can think of (but I'm sure there's more
that I'm not thinking of) are:

1) "COPY is fastest when used within the same transaction as an
earlier CREATE TABLE or TRUNCATE command. In such cases no WAL needs
to be written, because in case of an error, the files containing the
newly loaded data will be removed anyway." Would I be able to take
advantage of this if I:

BEGIN;
TRUNCATE import_table;
COPY import_table FROM 'file1';
COPY import_table FROM 'file2';
...
COPY import_table FROM 'file51';
END;

2) Is there a performance hit to doing a COPY to more than one table
in the same transaction?

Any other advice will be appreciated.

Regards,
--Lee

--
Lee Hachadoorian
PhD, Earth & Environmental Sciences (Geography)
Research Associate, CUNY Center for Urban Research
http://freecity.commons.gc.cuny.edu/