By Dr. Gail C. Christopher
Maria wakes before dawn in a small apartment outside Houston. She checks the price of eggs at the corner store on her phone, sighs, and starts her shift. She is 27, born in Texas, fluent in two languages, and firmly convinced that America is her home. She is also convinced that Latinos in the United States are not treated fairly. In this moment, a recent survey reveals that many Latino Americans hold both viewpoints, creating a frustrating environment for them.
One Latino man in the survey put it simply: “The vibe of America is tense because of the rising cost of living and too many negative uncertainties.” Another described the country as one “that’s tense and may begin failing its people as more time goes on with current leaders.” Latinos have not given up hope, but they are discouraged by the daily challenges they face.
Maria is a composite representing the tensions experienced by other Latinos in the Fourth Annual Heart of America Survey — a national study examining how Americans feel about their country at its 250th anniversary. Sponsored by the National Collaborative for Health Equity (NCHE), the poll surveyed 1,322 Americans in June, including 220 Latino respondents. It reveals a community pulled in two directions. Latinos are proud and frustrated, hopeful and wary, deeply invested in the country’s future, but skeptical of today’s political, economic, and social environment, portraying a demographic at a crossroads.
A Portrait in Motion
The survey leans toward younger respondents. Seven in ten Latino respondents are between 18 and 34 years old. When Latinos speak about immigration, the economy, or national pride, they are largely speaking in the voice of young adults still building careers, still deciding where to plant roots, still forming their view of what America owes them and what they owe America.
Further, the Latino Americans represented in the survey lean young, mobile, and rooted in the fast-growing corners of the country. The community also leans slightly male in this sample, with 53% men and 47% women. A full 34% of respondents live in the South and another 34% in the West, two regions where Latino population growth has been reshaping cities, school districts, and local economies for a generation. The Northeast accounts for 19% and the Midwest for 14%.
The Immigration Divide
No issue defines the Latino experience more than current immigration policies and practices. Recent enforcement and deportation measures have devastated families and communities, removing longtime residents and separating families. A clear majority of Latino respondents, 59%, say current immigration policies are unfair. It signals that the Latino community is not satisfied with the status quo.
Not surprisingly, their sentiment goes beyond frustration. When asked whether all immigrants should be guaranteed due process, 72% of Latinos said yes, one of the strongest, most unified positions in the survey. It reveals a community that sees immigration as a question of basic fairness, not a border issue. Due process is a legal and moral principle — the idea that everyone deserves a fair hearing before the system decides their fate. For nearly three-quarters of Latinos, that principle is non-negotiable.
Read together, these two numbers tell us that Latino views on immigration are not anti-enforcement or pro-chaos. They are pro-fairness. The community sees a system it believes is stacked, and it wants that system to treat people with dignity and give them their day in court. That is a distinction lost in much of the national discourse, but it lives at the heart of how Latinos feel.
Those sentiments extend well beyond immigration policy itself. Across the broader survey, 85% of all Americans agree that immigration is an important part of American history and culture. And 78% say immigrants contribute positively to American society. Further, 87% believe the U.S. needs to find a balance between welcoming immigrants and ensuring border security. For the Latino community, these are mainstream views, with Latinos among the most passionate advocates.
Many of the poll respondents grew up alongside classmates, coworkers, and family members whose immigration stories were complicated. For them, immigration is not an abstraction on cable news. It is a face at the dinner table. One Latino respondent described what being American means to him this way: “America is supposed to be a place where people from anywhere can prosper and find their place or success in the world.” When a policy debate is about someone you love, fairness stops being a talking point and becomes a matter of justice.
Proud, and Not
While immigration reveals frustration, national pride brings ambivalence. Asked whether they are proud to be American, 54% of Latinos said yes, a soft majority. Another 24% said they felt neutral, and 23% were not proud, demonstrating that nearly half of the community sits somewhere between lukewarm and disillusioned.
Still, the Latino community did not reject America. Most Latinos still claim pride in the country. But it is the story of a community whose pride comes with conditions and caveats. As one Latina woman in the survey put it: “It means a lot because I have access to a lot of opportunities that the people who weren’t born in this country don’t have.” Pride here is tied to access and possibility — not to a reflexive patriotism, but to a genuine belief in what America can offer when it is working as it should.
Another Latino respondent framed it through the lens of belonging: “Being American means that you have been integrated into the culture. The hope for peace and freedom still connects a lot of people.” That framing — belonging as integration, pride as connection — captures something real about how many Latinos experience American identity. It is relational.
There is a strong contrast with White Americans, with 80% of White respondents saying they are proud to be American, compared to just 54% of Latinos, a 26-point gap and the largest Latino-White divide in the survey. Why the distance? The answer lives in lived experience. When a community feels that the country’s policies treat it unfairly, pride becomes harder to summon. One Latino woman in the survey said: “Being American is not what it was…everyone (is) scared about whether we will be able to eat our next meal.” That statement connects pride directly to economic security and political climate — two things that, for many Latinos right now, feel precarious.
The survey also shows that Latinos’ complex pride coexists with a deep sense of civic investment. Asked about the meaning of being American at the country’s 250th anniversary, one young Latino man wrote: “Being an American means community, building a better world together from the ground up, and shared support for our history.” That is not someone checking out. It is the language of someone who still believes in the project, even when the project is letting them down.
The Stubborn Persistence of Hope
For all their frustration, Latinos have not given up on America, with 71% saying they are hopeful about the future, a remarkable level considering the skepticism also expressed in the poll. Clearly, even when pride wavers, faith in tomorrow holds firm.
“Something that gives me hope is the world making some changes in certain things,” one Latina Republican respondent said, in a deliberately open-ended tone but unmistakably sincere. For her, hope is not attached to a party or a policy. It is a disposition — a refusal to believe the story is over.
What makes this even more striking is the comparison with White Americans. On nearly every other measure, the two groups diverge, sometimes sharply. But in terms of hope, they are practically identical. Roughly 71-72% of both Latinos and Whites say they are hopeful about the future. After the gaps on pride and fairness, the two communities stand shoulder to shoulder here.
The shared hope may be the most inspirational finding in the survey. Across all respondents, 76% agree that Americans have more in common with one another than differences, with 84% believing that through faith, kindness, and empathy, America can overcome its divisions. And 89% say they want leaders who are transformers — people who can see through labels and political tricks and approach the world in a new way. Americans have not given up.
For Latinos especially, that hope is an act of will. It is easy to be hopeful when the present feels fair. It is much harder, and much more meaningful, to stay hopeful when you believe the present is stacked against you. That is exactly what the data shows Latinos doing. They are frustrated, but they are not defeated. They are critical, but they are not cynical. They want more from America precisely because they still believe America can deliver it.
The Weight of the Everyday
While pride and policy matter, most Latinos are overwhelmed by daily challenges like the cost of living. The survey shows a population under tremendous strain, a pressure coloring everything else.
For instance, 81% of respondents report feeling pressure due to the cost of food and groceries. One Latino man in the survey captured what that pressure feels like. “America is losing money, and people are going hungry. It’s bad out here.”
There are also concerns about employment, with 64% of respondents feeling pressure to find stable, well-paying work, 53% feeling pressured by elder care costs, and 44% struggling with childcare costs. Taken together, a picture of economic anxiety emerges running deep and wide through Latino communities, touching nearly every stage of life.
For a young community, these pressures cut especially hard. People in their 20s and 30s launch careers, start families, and build the kind of stability their parents may have chased before them. When groceries feel expensive and good jobs feel scarce, the American Dream starts to feel less like a promise and more like an impossible target. In fact, the broader survey found that 52 % of all Americans now believe the American Dream has become out of reach for most people — a slim majority, but a telling one.
This economic weight helps explain the ambivalence in the numbers. It is difficult to feel unreserved pride in a country where the basics feel out of reach. It is hard to trust that the system is fair when your paycheck does not stretch to the end of the month. The frustration Latinos express about immigration policy and the softness in their national pride are linked to their everyday struggles, anchored in the price of eggs and the search for steady work.
The research also found that Latino respondents frequently speak through the lenses of opportunity, culture, family, and freedom. Their vision of America is a capacious one — a place, as one respondent put it, where “people from anywhere can prosper and find their place or success in the world.” But that vision exists in constant tension with practical anxieties about safety, the cost of living, immigration policy, and whether the country remains a stable environment to build a future.
The Latino community is young enough to shape the country’s direction for decades, large enough to matter in every region, and clear enough in its values to be understood. It wants fairness in immigration and dignity for immigrants. It wants an economy where hard work still buys stability. It wants a country worth being proud of, and it is willing to wait and work for one.
Moreover, the data from this survey offers a grounding insight: 85% of all Americans believe it is important for schools to teach the full history of America, including the history of slavery and racism. That shared commitment to honest history — to reckoning with the country’s failures while still believing in its ideals — is exactly the spirit that Latino respondents bring to their own relationship with America.
The full 4th Annual Heart of America Poll is available HERE.
