JPod: The danger of pulling numbers out of the air is that they’re likely to be wrong. A quick look at the historical census figures (nicely digested for you here) shows us that the foreign-born share of the population in 1900 was 13.6 percent, while the foreign-born share in March of this year was 12.6 percent. Of course, since we’re talking about numbers, it’s also important to know that the immigrant population in 1900 was 10.3 million people, whereas it’s now almost 38 million (and if the guesses about the number of illegals missed by the Census Bureau are correct, the real number might be almost 40 million).