Times Topics: Immigration and Emigration
From the time of the nation’s founding, immigration has been crucial to the United States’ growth and a periodic source of conflict. In recent decades, the country has experienced another great wave of immigration, the largest since the 1920s. However, for the first time, illegal immigrants outnumbered legal ones. The number of illegal immigrants peaked at an estimated 11.9 million in 2008. About 11.2 million illegal immigrants were living in the United States in 2010, a number essentially unchanged from the previous year, a 2011 study showed.
