Associated Press, Census Bureau offer immigration promotion, faulty logic

Consider the widely-distributed AP report by Stephen Ohlemacher (apparent original title: "Census: Immigration Helps Big Metros Grow"):

Without immigrants pouring into the nation's big metro areas, places such as New York, Los Angeles and Boston would be shrinking as native-born Americans move farther out.

Many smaller areas, including Battle Creek, Mich., Ames, Iowa, and Corvallis, Ore., would shrink as well, according to population estimates to be released Thursday by the Census Bureau...

If you teach a third-grade class, a slightly challenging assignment might be to help the AP and the Census Bureau understand such fairly simple concepts as cause and effect. Namely, if there weren't so many immigrants/"immigrants" (the Census Bureau doesn't differentiate on legal/illegal status) moving in, would those native-born Americans be moving "further out"? That's certainly a strong possibility, yet the AP and apparently the Census Bureau don't consider it. Neither do others:

"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.

Many demographers associate shrinking populations with economic problems, typically poor job markets or prohibitive housing prices.

"A lot of cities rely on immigration to prop up their housing market and prop up their economies," said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank...

The second paragraph above seems to offer a bit of an unfollowed clue. While the article does include a quote from the Center for Immigration Studies, it also mentions Bush's latest amnesty scheme. I'll mark this one down as "propaganda".

Immigration2007a · Wed, 04/04/2007 - 21:13 · Importance: 1