As brick-throwing radicals clash with police in Los Angeles, a masked man on a motorcycle rides into the picture, waving a Mexican flag as large plumes of black smoke billow in the background. This is likely to be the defining image of the 2025 anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement riots.

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It’s unfortunate, and not merely because political violence has frequently taken hold of our cities’ streets in recent years. The scene simply isn’t emblematic of the Hispanic American. Indeed, all it does is foster anti-Latino and anti-immigrant sentiment around the country.

The immigrant experience is far better encapsulated by the Latino working in the Los Angeles Police Department or one who stood among the 2,000 National Guard members deployed by President Donald Trump to suppress the unrest. It might shock some people to learn that approximately 50% of our Border Patrol and about 25% of our ICE officers are of Hispanic descent.

Then again, unlike would-be Marxist insurrectionists who dream of Reconquista, Hispanic Americans tend to be patriotic. Latinos make up 27% of active-duty Marines. That percentage has been growing. There are nearly a million Latino veterans of the two Gulf Wars.

It’s not the average Latino American who advocates and funds anti-ICE protests. As with trendy leftist movements like “Free Palestine” and Black Lives Matter, progressive groups not only agitate for violence but bankroll it. Those “F*** ICE” packs filled with tactical gear and phone numbers for “jail support” that were handed out to “protesters” on a nightly basis in Los Angeles weren’t paid for by the East Los Angeles family working to break into the middle class.

It’s groups like the Service Employees International Union, ostensibly here to champion the plight of the American worker, that joined “allies” in the “Summer of Resistance.” Now, let there be no confusion. The largest public sector union in the nation isn’t merely resisting the law this summer; it is resisting the idea that borders or citizenship should matter. The recent Los Angeles riots, in fact, started after the arrest of David Huerta, the president of the California SEIU, who attempted to block a police vehicle that was entering a property to round up those who were breaking the law. He rallied the crowd to defy the police.

It’s curious that activists who conflate legal and illegal immigrants seem only to care about one of those groups. Rioting and looting often took place in predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods within Los Angeles. Leftist organizations spur these inorganic uprisings because there’s little public support for chaos.

Indeed, the Latino position on illegal immigration is getting more conservative, not less. A recent Ipsos-Telemundo poll, reflecting the trends seen in other surveys, found that 42% of Latinos support building a wall or fence along the entirety of the southern United States border. That position has jumped by 12 points since 2021. Thirty-eight percent of Latinos support sending every illegal immigrant back to his or her country of origin. That number has jumped 10 points since 2021. In addition, 64% of Latinos believe the president should be allowed to shut down the border unilaterally if there are too many immigrants attempting to cross it.

Those numbers aren’t terribly far from the national average. Obviously, polls often don’t tell the entire story, yet the trend is clear. There are likely numerous reasons why Latino attitudes are changing. Surely, none is less prominent than the fact that from 2021 to 2025, Democrats incentivized wave after wave of migrants to overrun the border. Hispanic families bear the brunt of the trafficking, drugs, and gang violence that often accompany a porous border.

Moreover, newcomers who take the time and effort to slog through the process of becoming a citizen, which is no easy task, probably don’t appreciate that others take shortcuts. I’ve met numerous legal immigrants over the years who vehemently opposed illegal immigration for that reason. And they have every reason to be angered.

Finally, there’s an acceleration of Latino assimilation, which means a declining attachment to the old country. Hispanic Americans increasingly act like any other minority, primarily concerned about the future here at home.

Most evidence points to Latino immigrants assimilating more or less at the same pace as previous large groups of newcomers. Hispanic identity fades generationally. Millions of second- and third-generation immigrants from Latin America don’t self-identify as Hispanic anymore. Latinos also tend to marry other ethnicities at high rates. Considering how the U.S. government has allowed, oftentimes incentivized, millions of illegal immigrants to overload Hispanic neighborhoods, undermining the prospects of integration, it’s impressive.

Now, it should be noted that it’s misleading to treat Latinos as a monolith, considering the wide ethnic diversity that exists within that designation. The Dominican and Mexican experience, for instance, is widely divergent. Yet one of the biggest miscalculations of the Left was to assume that all Hispanics would be in favor of border chaos and criminality solely due to their minority status. This kind of thinking is symptomatic of a party that’s obsessed with skin color.

Years ago, President Ronald Reagan claimed that “Latinos are Republicans, they just don’t know it yet.” And in a few years, the Latino vote might well be up for grabs. The Associated Press found that Trump, who, mind you, made no secret of his position on the border or deportations, won 43% of the Latino vote (48% of men), which was an 8-point increase from the last presidential election in 2020. This shift was most pronounced in red states like Texas and Florida. If a similar movement takes hold in blue America, it could prove disastrous for Democrats.  

Assessing this trend, political analysts like to contend that Latinos are the ones “drifting” in a more conservative direction. It is far more likely that Latinos are abandoning Democrats because they’re the ones drifting into an insanely progressive direction. Going “woke” hasn’t proved particularly appealing to the “Latinx” community, as it were, who are predominantly Catholic (with a growing minority of evangelical Protestants) and generally hold normie views on the notions of family and gender.

Perhaps there is more to it as well. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that the average Latino is an adherent of Milton Friedman, but surely the socialistic turn of the American Left will often remind immigrants of the corrupt Third World leftist regimes they just escaped.

One thing we can quantify with some certainty is economic success. There is no place on the planet where Hispanics do better. It’s not even close. Sure, it’s become something of a creaky stereotype, but that’s the reason millions of people often risk their lives to cross the border every year. Measured on their own, American Latinos rank as the fifth-largest economy in the world, growing at a faster rate than both India and China. According to a 2021 McKinsey and Company study, Latino wealth has grown by an average of about 7% annually for the past two decades, which is more than twice the rate of non-Latino growth. In recent years, Latinos have started more businesses per capita than any other racial or ethnic group in the country. In 2023, they created 36% of new businesses, though they are about 19% of the population.

You know who’s not creating anything? The entitled socialist lunatics who are throwing Molotov cocktails at the police.

Economic success is predicated on assimilation. We are the only country in the modern world to have assimilated a wide range of immigrants successfully on such a massive scale in a way that is beneficial for both newcomer and host. Latinos share the values that make it possible. Not everyone does. We would be achieving this goal even faster if the southern border were under control. It certainly won’t be achieved by discarding the law or galvanizing people to break in or eliminating expectations that those who do come adopt our norms. That is a position shared by rioters and the mainstream Left.  

STEPHEN COLBERT’S CANCELLATION IS CAPITALISM, NOT CENSORSHIP 

Now, obviously, voting Republican isn’t a requirement for loving your country. Flying a Mexican flag to protest the upholding of the law, on the other hand, is almost surely a sign that you do not. One shouldn’t need to explain why the prevalence of foreign flags among rampaging radicals is problematic. It’s one thing to fly the flag of the nation of your ancestors along with the American flag, celebrating a unique friendship with this country, and quite another to use the Mexican flag as the emblem of an invasion. And an unregulated, illegal mass migration that corrodes the sovereignty of a nation is, by definition, an invasion.

That is the goal of the Los Angeles rioter and his apologist. It’s not the goal of the average American Latino. Let’s make sure not to confuse the two. 

David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner.