DADvocate

CNN.com carried this story today: Census: Immigrants stabilize big-city populations. The gist of the story seems to be that immigrants, including illegal immigrants are good for cities.

Without immigrants pouring into the nation's big metro areas, places such as New York, Los Angeles and Boston would be losing population.

Many smaller areas, including Battle Creek, Michigan, Ames, Iowa, and Corvallis, Oregon, would lose people as well, according to population estimates released Thursday by the Census Bureau.

"Immigrants are filling the void as domestic migrants are seeking opportunities in other places," said Mark Mather, a demographer at the Population Reference Bureau, a private research organization.

The New York metro area, which includes suburbs in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, added 1 million immigrants from 2000 to 2006. Without those immigrants, the region would have lost nearly 600,000 people.

Without immigration, the Los Angeles, California, metro area would have lost more than 200,000, the San Francisco, California, area would have lost 188,000 and the Boston, Massachusetts, area would have lost 101,000.

The U.S. is far from over-populated and keeping it that way seems a good idea. If Los Angeles lost population, maybe its famous smog would decrease.

Further down the article:

There are about 36 million immigrants in the United States. About one-third are in the country illegally. The Census Bureau, however, does not distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants.

Why doesn't the Census Bureau distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants? Is this another example of keeping our collective head in the sand and ignoring the problem?

The government's claim to be providing us security from terrorists is little more than a bad joke when 12 million people are roaming our country illegally.