In the Americas, 2026 is a year of double memory. As the United States marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence and the hemisphere marks 200 years since Bolívar’s Congress of Panama, another story quietly reminds us how unfinished those founding ideas remain: the maturation of a transnational Latino community that has become one of the largest and most enduring in the hemisphere, and that only continues to grow.
The two anniversaries this July remind us that the Americas were founded on competing ideas of belonging. The Declaration of Independence gave rise to the sovereign nation-state, with its borders and its gatekeepers. The Congress of Panama imagined the opposite: a hemispheric political community bound by common purpose, rather than divided by frontiers. The nation-state won throughout the Americas. Bolívar’s confederation collapsed almost immediately, ratified by only one republic, and the Americas settled into separate nations, each guarding its own door and deciding, on its own terms, who belonged.
Two centuries later, these opposing ideas of governing have found an unlikely arbiter: the Latino diaspora in the United States. For most of the modern history of the Americas, the question of belonging has been posed at the border. But the question of who may enter has quietly been overtaken by a deeper question about belonging. The largest community of Latin American origin now lives inside the United States, and most of its members were born there. The living test of which founding vision prevails is no longer whom the United States admits, but whether it can recognize the people already within its borders as its own.
From their founding, the republics of the Western Hemisphere have preached open doors while keeping a firm hand on the latch. The U.S. Declaration of Independence protested the Crown’s obstruction of immigration; Argentina’s 1853 constitution offered to “secure the benefits of liberty” to “all the men of the world who wish to dwell” on its soil. Yet the words of welcome always carried an asterisk. Across the hemisphere, elites defined a “desired immigrant”—European, imagined as the raw material of a white republic—against an “undesirable” everyone else: Indigenous, Black, Asian, mixed. The open door and the gatekeeper were never reconciled. They have been passed down through the generations, and no population has inherited that contradiction more fully than the Latinos who are now permanently part of the U.S.
From Movement to Membership
For two centuries, the U.S. has placed limits on who could come in. Now, as a nation of immigrants, the more pressing question is who is already here to stay and who continues to live as though that permanence could be revoked at any moment. The U.S. Latino population reached 68 million in 2024—one in five Americans, up from one in twenty in 1970. Beyond the size of this population, its settledness is also significant: Of the 68 million, 45.4 million were born in the United States, and 79 percent are U.S. citizens. Recent population growth has been driven overwhelmingly by U.S.-born generations rather than by new immigration, underscoring how thoroughly the Latino presence has become an intrinsic feature of American society. Its median age is slightly below 30, the youngest among any major demographic group, and each year large new cohorts enter adulthood, further deepening the Latino presence in U.S. civic life. This is not a population in transit, waiting at a threshold, as it is often portrayed to be. It is a permanent presence that happens to maintain deep ties to the rest of the hemisphere, the very transnational belonging the nation-state was built to prevent.
A country that sees Latinos as temporary writes border policy. A country that recognizes them as permanent writes policies of belonging, and the United States has barely begun to do so. To treat a large, rooted, mostly native-born population as perpetually foreign is not a new posture; it’s the founding sorting of the desirable and the undesirable, wearing modern clothes. The border has moved inward, from the boundary line to the citizen’s own standing. Membership, not movement, has become the primary unresolved issue.
Membership Becomes Power
Diasporas have long shaped U.S. policy through organized advocacy, petitioning the government from outside it. The Latino diaspora represents a different kind of influence, stemming not primarily from lobbying the state but from increasingly constituting the electorate and the institutions of the state itself. In 2024, 36.2 million Latinos were eligible to vote, a 153 percent increase since 2000, and constituting half of all the growth in the U.S. electorate over the previous four years. Latinos are now roughly 15 percent of eligible voters, and about 1.4 million more join the rolls each year simply by turning 18. Both political parties court them; neither can dismiss them.
And yet, demographic membership has not become political membership. Latinos are a fifth of the population and a seventh of the electorate, but hold only about 11 percent of House seats, 6 percent of the Senate, and barely 2 percent of elected offices nationwide. The people are already integrated into the population, but the institutions have not caught up.
Political incorporation, moreover, does not guarantee political solidarity. Like every established community before it, the Latino electorate contains competing visions of migration, belonging, and the nation’s future, shaped by national origins and political histories. Membership does not resolve the question of who belongs; it simply relocates the debate inside the polity itself.
What the Present Asks
The anniversaries we commemorate this year ultimately ask us to consider political imagination alongside migration policy. How nation states manage borders is one question; whether they are prepared to recognize their extant communities is another. The intense focus on border enforcement over the past year has made that deeper question easy to overlook. By many enforcement measures, the border is quieter than it has been in years. But enforcement is a territorial response and cannot fix an inherently political challenge.
The United States can no longer approach the Latino diaspora as though it were a temporary condition to be managed until it disappears. It’s a permanent fixture of the American public, rooted across generations, woven into the country’s civic, economic, and political life. Recognition begins with the acknowledgment that belonging is already a social fact, long before it becomes a legal one.
Law, in turn, should catch up to that reality. A population that has put down roots should not be governed as though it remains perpetually provisional. The details of immigration reform will remain contested, but the principle should not. Institutions ought to reflect the permanence of the people they govern rather than the assumptions of an earlier era.
The same is true of the hemisphere itself. Bolívar failed to build a political community through treaties, but history has produced a different type of agreement. Across the Americas, millions of families, languages, faiths, and economic ties already connect societies that politics continues to treat as separate worlds. The transnational community Bolívar imagined did not disappear with the Congress of Panama. It emerged instead through the everyday lives of the people who crossed borders and stayed.
The unfinished question of the Americas has never been simply who could cross its borders. It has always been whether the political communities created by migration would eventually be recognized as belonging. The Latino diaspora has already answered the question history left unresolved. The task now is for institutions to recognize what society already knows: the Americas already share a people. Their politics have not yet caught up.
Ernesto Fiocchetto, PhD, is a senior advisor with Pan-American Strategic Advisors and a faculty member in the International Relations Department at Florida International University.
Photo via Univision.
