America’s Largest Minority Is Also Its Most Misunderstood

History is being made on the Rio Grande. Hundreds of thousands of migrants braved the journey across it last year, setting records and contributing to an urgent border crisis. As spectacle, it has been transfixing.

Yet misconceptions abound. It’s as if the sight of a migrant scaling a wall or wading ashore is now a Rorschach test, our Rashomon. Depending on where we sit on the political spectrum, we perceive different truths: Some see a brown “invasion,” others an unremitting drug war, a humanitarian crisis, a political failure, a symptom of societal collapse. The politicizations are legion, and the distortions dire

More than anything, these images cloud two key realities: Not all migrants crossing the southern border are Latin Americans; Chinese newcomers are now the fastest growing group coming in from Mexico. And most Latinos are not rootless, illegal transients — burdens on the society — as some citizens may think, but a force for American progress.

The majority of Latinos in this country were born here and are English speakers. Some of us have families who inhabited this continent long before the Pilgrims set foot on its shores. Hispanics have fought loyally in every American war since the Revolution. The Army’s eighth chief of ordnance, Brig. Gen. Stephen Vincent Benét, was Hispanic. The first admiral of the Navy, David Farragut (“Damn the torpedoes, Full speed ahead!”), whose commanding statue dominates Farragut Square only steps from the White House, was Hispanic. Roughly one out of every four U.S. Marines today is a Latino. Invasion, indeed.

We are Americans. We have served America since its foundation; we have contributed richly to its culture, its science. Little to none of that history is taught in American public schools; and in the media and entertainment industries, the image of the Latino has historically been roundly negative, if present at all. This, too, needs to change. A vigorous antidote to border fever is in order.

Take the economy. Research has shown that immigrant workers pay taxes and have a net zero effect on government budgets. Whether behind a pupusa stand or a polished desk in a major corporation, Latino workers occupy every rung of the economy and own a considerable stake in the financial success of this country.

Much of that work ethic and entrepreneurship has been spirited for centuries, starting with sixteenth-century traders in the Spanish settlement of St. Augustine, Fla.; or the first Dominican in Manhattan, Juan Rodríguez, who, by 1613, was trading weapons for furs and serving the Dutch as well as the Native Americans. In the 1800s, Mexican vaqueros, the continent’s first cowboys, trained an emerging class of white buckaroos, furnishing them with saddles, 10-gallon hats, chaps and lassos. A century later, during the 1950s and into the 1970s, waves of Cubans and Puerto Ricans arrived on the East Coast, bringing bodegas, paladares (family-run restaurants) and other vibrant Latino enterprises.

Within a generation, Wall Street analysts — and an American president — were marveling at the business acumen of Latinos. But the explosion in the years that followed was even more astonishing. Though Hispanic owners often have difficulty getting financing, in the decade from 2012 to 2022, their small businesses multiplied by 44 percent (more than 10 times the rate of other similarly sized businesses). This is an incursion of a different kind.

Surprisingly, almost 90 percent of immigrant Latino ventures earning at least $1 million a year are owned by millennials (people in their late 20s to early 40s) who came to the United States as youths. That is certainly true for the Argentine businessman Ezequiel Vázquez-Ger and his Venezuelan wife, Mafe Polini, who flew into Washington from their respective homelands when they were 24 years old and began at the bottom of the economic ladder. In time, they dreamed of owning a restaurant, used their savings to help fund their first, and ended up owning six establishments in the capital (one of them earning a Michelin star).

It is also true for José, a Honduran I interviewed for this piece, who asked me to drop his surname because of his undocumented status. After five serial deportations from both the United States and Mexico, José finally crossed the border as a teenager, started work as a lowly bricklayer, and now, at 43 and still without papers, owns his own home in a major American city, as well as a robust plumbing business.

The contributions — by those with families who have been here for centuries and those who arrived only last year — are monumental. Every year, Latino businesses generate about $800 billion for the U.S. economy. Few, if any, entrepreneurial groups in the United States have experienced as much growth.

But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Those small establishments — the housecleaning operations, construction companies, trucking enterprises, beauty shops, ethnic markets and restaurants from Manhattan to Los Angeles — employ millions. Hispanics were responsible for 73 percent of the growth in the U.S. labor force between 2010 and 2020. Today, if Latinos in the United States were their own separate nation, they would represent the fifth-largest G.D.P. in the world.

And yet there is that apparently majority impulse to think that a figure jumping a wall represents us. The lie now supersedes the reality. According to a 2021 poll, Americans of all backgrounds believe that the share of Latinos who are undocumented is more than two times as high as it actually is.

If Latino contributions to the economy are so ubiquitous, if our history on this soil is age-old and honorable, why are those perceptions so skewed? Why are the antipathies so profound? Why do non-Hispanic Americans incorrectly believe that one out of every three of us is deportable?

It’s not just racism. It’s our invisibility. Even as we fill the classrooms, feed the nation and help keep the economy afloat, too often, we are overlooked — unjustly erased from school curriculums, from the media, from corporate boardrooms, from history. Maybe it’s time for America to take a good look.