Illegal aliens now comprise nearly a quarter of the country’s total foreign-born population, which has continued growing to 45.6 million, a demography study finds.

The latest study by Pew Research Center reveals that about 23 percent of the country’s booming foreign-born population is illegally living in the United States. Since 1990, when an estimated 3.4 million illegal aliens were in the U.S., the illegal alien population has tripled in size.

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While the illegal alien population has reached unprecedented highs, so has the legal immigrant population living in the U.S. Today, there are an estimated 35.2 million legal immigrants living in the country.

The last time the U.S. foreign-born population was this high was in 1910 when immigrants made up 14.7 percent of the total country’s population.

The country’s last immigration boom — between 1900 and 1920 — was eventually met with a near immigration moratorium. Between 1925 and 1966, the yearly U.S. legal immigration level did not exceed 327,000 admissions, a four-decades-long near moratorium that allowed the massive inflows of immigrants from before 1925 the ability to assimilate.

Since 1980, though, the number of legal immigrants admitted to the U.S. every year has not dipped below 525,000. Since 1999, annual legal immigration levels have not dropped below 645,000. And since 2004, the number of legal immigrants admitted to the U.S. every year has not dipped below 957,000 admissions a year. (Excerpt from Breitbart News, analysis by John Binder.)

Pew states:

As the number of unauthorized immigrants shrank by 14% from 2007 to 2017, the U.S. lawful immigrant population continued to grow. During this period, the population of lawful U.S. immigrants – citizens and noncitizens, on permanent and temporary visas – rose by almost a quarter, to 35.2 million.

Unauthorized immigrants were 23% of the 45.6 million foreign-born residents in the U.S. in 2017.

Despite the decline over the decade, the number of unauthorized immigrants in 2017 was triple the 3.5 million in 1990. . . .

Among the 20 birth countries with the largest number of U.S. unauthorized immigrants, there were statistically significant increases in five from 2007 to 2017. Reflecting the growth in unauthorized immigrants from Central America, they included the three Northern Triangle nations of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, a trend also displayed in rising apprehensions of people from those countries at the border. India and Venezuela also had increases in their U.S. populations of unauthorized immigrants over the past decade. (Excerpt from Pew Research.)