Imagine no aliens...

Tom Tancredo has a nice article at NRO that looks at the difference between Legal Immigrants and Illegal Immigrants and what they contribute to society. This is a good heads-up after the May 1st demonstrations -- we should be focusing on the Illegal Aliens and not the millions of people who have assimilated into our culture and in so doing, enriched it:

A Day Without an Illegal Immigrant
An imaginary exercise

What would a day without illegal aliens really be like? Let�s try to imagine it.

On May 1, millions of illegal aliens working in meat-processing plants, construction, restaurants, hotels, and other �jobs Americans won�t do� are supposed to stay home from work to show the importance of their labor to our nation�s economy. Doubtless, there will be some inconvenience if that happens, but there is another side to the story that is not being reported.

We are talking about illegal aliens, not mere �immigrants.� If legal immigrants stopped working for a day, we would miss the services of physicians, nurses, computer programmers, writers, actors, musicians, entrepreneurs of all stripes, and some airline pilots�as well as the CEO of Google. That would be more than an inconvenience, but it won�t happen because legal immigrants are not out marching angrily for rights that are already protected by our courts.

But if illegal aliens all took the day off and were truly invisible for one day, there would be some plusses along with the mild inconveniences.

Hospital emergency rooms across the southwest would have about 20-percent fewer patients, and there would be 183,000 fewer people in Colorado without health insurance.

OBGYN wards in Denver would have 24-percent fewer deliveries and Los Angeles�s maternity-ward deliveries would drop by 40 percent and maternity billings to Medi-Cal would drop by 66 percent.

Youth gangs would see their membership drop by 50 percent in many states, and in Phoenix, child-molestation cases would drop by 34 percent and auto theft by 40 percent.

In Durango, Colorado, and the Four Corners area and the surrounding Indian reservations, the methamphetamine epidemic would slow for one day, as the 90 percent of that drug now being brought in from Mexico was held in Albuquerque and Farmington a few hours longer. According to the sheriff of La Plata County, Colorado, meth is now being brought in by ordinary illegal aliens as well as professional drug dealers.

Tom digs into some of the crime statistics in the rest of his article. Good stuff!