This isn’t just a personal story. For if last year’s election saw Perez — who spoke to me using a pseudonym — go red for the first time ever, his brothers did too, alongside 42% of all Latino voters. That, it goes without saying, should really worry Democrats. For decades, they relied on the group to cross the electoral line in the sand, and as recently as August, the CEO of Voto Latino predicted a wave of young Hispanic registrants would push Harris to victory. Now, though, it’s clear that strategy is dead. And if the white liberal establishment hopes to revive it, it must finally take people like Perez seriously, viewing them as go-getting individuals rather than faceless members of a passive ethnic bloc.

On the surface, it was inflation that pushed Latinos like Perez to the Republicans. “My business runs on gas,” the 28-year-old says, explaining how rising energy bills were costing his firm $10,000 a year. Quite aside from his own family, you can spot similar sentiments right across his state and hometown. In November, Trump won 42% of Pennsylvania’s Hispanic vote, up 15 points from 2020. In Erie, a chilly Pennsylvania town nuzzling the Great Lakes, voter turnout surged across several Hispanic areas. Erie’s Latino voters followed Perez in plumping for Trump, with many clearly drawn to the Republicans promise to “drill, baby, drill” and keep cost-raising regulations to a minimum.

In truth, though, the Democrats’ problems with Latino men goes way beyond the transient vagaries of economic policy. Speak to Perez, a stout, baby-faced 28-year-old, and that challenge can be grasped in a single word: immigration. “No human is illegal” may pass muster at the local gastropub. But 54% of Americans oppose liberal border policies, and Perez is among them. As he puts it: “Biden’s open borders really pissed me off.”

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Learn a little about Perez’s background and this may seem surprising. Nico and his parents, Juan and Maria, came to America illegally, wrapping their ankles in garlic to ward off snakes and sleeping in caves at night. From there, like so many immigrants, they worked in the shadows. In the summer, they picked apples. In the fall and winter, they labored in northwest Pennsylvania’s vineyards. “As a kid,” Perez recalls, “I didn’t know much about it [the family’s legal status]. I just knew I couldn’t go to Mexico and to stay out of trouble.” The second part, at least, was easy. A good student himself, his mom was “big” on education. “There is no need to work,” his dad always told him. “You have to go to college.”

In 2011, Nico’s father, with the backing of an employer, started the green card process. He eventually earned citizenship, which was conferred to his children. Nico’s mom, who lacked effective legal counsel but possessed plenty of reflexive honesty, confessed to carrying her baby boy across the border. This inadvertent admission to “human smuggling” caused her to be extradited, and earned her an automatic 10-year ban on returning. “She didn’t even think of the repercussions of admitting she smuggled her son,” Nico sighs, looking away to keep his composure. “If she had lied, then no 10-year ban.” Since 2011, Maria Perez has lived with her sister in central Mexico. The family is still waiting on the appeals process. Nico, for his part, tries to be stoical. “It is hard,” he says. “We talk to mom two-to-three times per week.” But his eyes betray a pain that goes deep.

Eight years later, in 2019, Perez again encountered the immigration system, when he married his sweetheart. Hailing from a village near his birthplace of Manuel Doblado, a sleepy town of 40,000 in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, he met Sofia online. It helped, too, that the pair had friends in common. For three years, he traveled to Mexico to see his wife, and later their daughter Luciana. It was very hard for him, he concedes, but even tougher on his wife. “She was very isolated.”

Eventually, Sofia and Gianna got their citizenship. Apart from his mother, waiting for a judgment from US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the family is now reunited. But that leaves an obvious question: as an illegal immigrant himself, albeit one who finally regulated his status, why is Perez skeptical of more recent arrivals? The answer, perhaps, has something to do with the way immigration policy has changed over recent years. Yes, they snuck across the border, but the Perez family earned their way later. His mother even paid for her honesty with deportation. These days, though, Perez argues the system discourages discipline. Though immigrants can expect to wait up to a decade for their asylum claims to be processed, many are eligible for federal and state funds. “In my dad’s neighborhood,” he says, “nobody works, they don’t have jobs.”

It’s tempting to be skeptical of this rhetoric. The United States has always been built by immigrants — English, Irish, Italian — reaching the city on the hill before slamming the drawbridge behind them. Yet study the numbers and Perez does seem to have a point. From 2021 to 2023, over six million people arrived at the southern border, up from 1.7 million between 2018 and 2020. Almost half of these were released into the US pending adjudication of their asylum claims. More than that, Perez’s claims about funding do appear to jibe with the facts. In the past, undocumented immigrants were ineligible for state aid. Today, those who would have been undocumented are now asylum seekers, making them eligible for a driver’s license, work permits, and government support. Lin Manuel Miranda’s claim that “immigrants get things done” still holds true: the foreign-born work at higher rates than the native-born. But perception, especially in politics, is reality.

In short, then, “open borders” is far more than just a Right-wing talking point, something even Democrats are starting to concede. “The border is a mess,” says Adam Frisch, a candidate for Congress in Colorado. “That doesn’t make you a racist.” Will Marshall, the president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, makes a similar point. “Biden opened the doors to the border and [faced] a huge backlash,” he tells me. “Polls show that people believe that illegal workers depress wages. They [also] resent that they get social benefits.”

Once again, these arguments are backed by numbers. Immigration unquestionably primes economic growth — but it also depresses wages for those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. One study estimated this loss at nearly 10% of a low-skilled laborer’s pay. Pro-Publica reports that Perez’s resentment is common in immigrant communities across the nation. Yes, it is ironic that those who were once were undocumented feel aggrieved because the path is now easier. But progressives have a choice. They can wail and stamp their feet, or accept that many recent arrivals have visceral reactions to the immigration issue born from emotional scars. Newsflash: humans are complicated.

Nor, of course, are these sentiments limited to immigrants. In 2020, less than a quarter of voters wanted more immigration restrictions. Today, that number has jumped to 55%. As Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow with the Migration Policy Institute, lately admitted: “There is no constituency left in this country that favors large-scale immigration.”

This poses another question. If open borders are so unpopular — not least among Latinos, a group vital to liberal success — why would Democrats go ahead and promote them anyway? Ironically enough, the answer can probably be found at the feet of another bloc: white liberals. A tiny sliver of the electorate, less than 10% of voters, they hold positions well to the Left of the average American. Yet by dominating the ranks of journalism, academics and politics, they set the parameters of left-of-center debate. I should know. I’m a liberal college professor. My wife is a renowned research scientist. We swim in the bright blue seas of white liberal groupthink, even if we collectively have no clue about how out-of-touch those “No Human is Illegal” yard signs truly are.

And if what Frisch calls the “cultural demagoguery of the high and mighty” is bad enough on the immigration debate, it’s equally damaging downstream. For if unfettered migration, and the generous state support that comes with it, implies a well-intentioned desire to turn the US into a European social democracy, it’s clear that Nico Perez and many other immigrants just aren’t interested. “I always had a hustle,” he says, evoking his capitalist spirit as he goes. In high school, that hustle started with buying and reselling old cellphones and new Air Jordans. During Covid, he bought and resold PlayStations and Xboxes. Consoles were in high demand during lockdown, allowing Perez to make up to $8,000 a month even as a student. Nor did he neglect his supply chain, getting to know his UPS driver and leaving drinks for him by the door.

Eventually, Perez and his dad started a landscaping business. It’s booming. Nico, his father, and their five full-time employees work 60-65 hours a week, landscaping in the summer and plowing snow through the long Erie winters. “They work their asses off,” he beams of his immigrant employees. “They say: ‘I don’t have a family. I want to work hard and help you. If you eat, we eat.’”

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And if this hard-scrabble approach speaks to why, rightly or wrongly, Perez sees himself as different to more recent immigrants, it also hints at the limits of liberal obsessions over “equity” — let alone the idea, remarkably popular among progressives, that worldly success is largely beyond an individual’s control. If, to be blunt, Perez’s father could dodge snakes and sweat picking grapes, and if Nico himself could make near six figures while still a teenager, why can’t everyone else? “You can’t just appeal to people’s material interests,” is how Marshall puts it. “You have to appeal to their moral interests. The overeducated classes breed people who are disgusted by American values and that conveys to voters. Working people don’t want handouts, they want prosperity and the American Dream.”

For Democrats, then, the way back starts with understanding bedrock American values, and building a political economy that balances collective security with personal prospects. In practice, this probably looks a lot like the “moral capitalism” that so anchored the liberal coalition during the post-war boom, even as it also shares much with Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting populism. Not that Nico Perez has time for such high-flung thinking. He’s far too busy, even after Trump’s recent executive order repealing birthright citizenship. “I have mixed emotions about it,” he says of the news. “The border is a mess. But I’m so busy running my business that I have not taken much time to consider it.”

It’s a telling ambivalence. If Trump follows his hardline rhetoric to its extremist conclusion, Democrats surely have a path back to power. Like Perez, after all, immigrants support immigration. But like their native-born peers, they also want boundaries and restraints, and the space to enjoy the fruits of their labor as ambitious new Americans. For Perez, at least, that’s nothing too grand. He tells me of a day last October, when he took his baseball-mad father to his first ever Major League game. There, amid the popcorn and the crowd, they watched their beloved Yankees take on the Cleveland Guardians. The elder Perez is a stoical man, for good reason. From the desert sun to the toil of manual labor, he’s spent his life fighting for his kids, even as he can’t now share in their success with his wife. Yet that day in the stands, Nico says his father was transformed. “He was yelling and screaming,” he recalls. “It was great to see.” The very image of an American Dream, albeit a modest one, and one liberals should surely take more seriously.

A survey from the Pew Research Center released last month showed that there is a rapid decline in Catholisism among American Hispanics — tumbling from 67% in 2010 to 46%. “That’s consistent with other Latin American countries, such as Brazil, where large numbers of Catholics have converted to Evangelical Christianity,” says Dr Andrew Chesnut, Professor of Religious Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. The “health and wealth” promises of Pentecostalism in particular are driving people across the continent to Evangelical churches. “The interesting difference between Latin America and the United States,” says Chesnut, “is the percentage of religious ‘nones’, which has tripled to 30 percent in 12 years. In Latin America, they’re only usually in the 12-14 percent range.”

Nones are people who have no faith at all, and they are fast swallowing up white Christian America — now firmly a minority. In 1996, the year Bill Clinton was sworn in for his second term as president, almost 65% of Americans identified as white and Christian. Now, only 44% do. In 1990, only 7% of Americans said that they were nones, but that figure has increased four-fold over the last 30 years, largely because of young people. Today, almost half of Gen Z — young adults born from 1997 onwards — say they have no religion.

For a long time, American exceptionalism saw the United States buck the European trend of secularisation. And faith among Hispanics, who tend to come from more religious backgrounds than white Americans, remained particularly strong. Catholicism was seen, even among the young, as part of their identity — but “the inflexibility of the Church to modernise its dogma and doctrine in terms of blessing, same sex marriage, and female clergy really is culturally out of touch with Millennials and Generation Z”, Chesnut says. High-profile sex scandals have also put people off — too much even for the Latino community’s cultural Catholics. People who once ticked the box identifying as Catholic, even if they weren’t regularly attending, are now firmly in the “none” camp. And Hispanics are now abandoning the faith as fast as the rest of the country.

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Ryan Burge, author of The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going, suspects that changes in Hispanic faith have to do with how devout your parents were when they came to the United States. “If they are super devout, you’re more likely to stay Catholic,” he says. “If they really weren’t religious at all, you’re much more likely to become a none.” But there is a third way: “If they’re kind of on the fence about religion, then you might become Evangelical.”

The material promises offered by born-again churches are also attractive. A Pew study in 2014 found that 49% of Hispanics who were raised as Catholics but have become Protestants say that an important factor was finding a church that “reaches out and helps its members more”. Moreover, the prosperity gospel preached in Evangelical churches rewards hard work — a philosophy that often appeals to those who’ve signed up to the American Dream, which reassures them that if they put in the effort, they’ll be rewarded. Faith healing is also an attractive offering, given that health care is usually out-of-reach for working-class people in the United State.

Assimilation is often a primary aim. “We’re seeing a rising number of conservative Hispanics jumping the fence from Catholicism to Evangelicalism, because Evangelicalism is a very American religion,” says Burge. Immigrants to the United States often have more malleable identities, and “becoming an Evangelical is a way to jump into the mainstream of your town or city”, says Burge.   Evangelical Churches are a marker of a new life and new identity. Being born again is both a spiritual and actual experience: you’re baptised as a follower of Jesus, and as an American. Some scholars describe conversion to Evangelical faith as a kind of safety mechanism, stemming from the belief that Hispanic immigrants become more American, and less deportable.

The change in the religious landscape reflects a bigger picture in American politics: the stark, and increasingly pronounced, city-rural divide. The “God Gap” is a part of that: if you’re in a big city,you’re likely to be secular; in a rural area, you’re likely to be church-going — or at least religiously-identifying but not attending. Politically, these religious shifts are beginning to have a real impact: the Democrats are making gains in secularising regions, while the Republicans are on the march in places where religion is on the rise.

Hispanics are increasingly adopting the cultural markers once dominated by white Americans — and with that has come a change in party allegiance. In the 2020 election, Hispanic Evangelicals voted almost 50/50 for Trump and Biden, while two-thirds of Hispanic Catholics voted for their co-religionist Biden. In Hispanic-majority Miami-Dade County, which Hillary Clinton won by 30 percentage points in 2016, Biden won by only seven in 2020.  Even more striking is Texas, long vaunted as a state preparing to turn to the Democrats. This would be electorally disastrous for the Republicans: Texas is the second largest state in the electoral college. But along the Texas-Mexico border, in the Rio Grande Valley, the number of votes for Republicans has jumped astronomically. After losing Starr County, in southernmost Texas, by 60 percentage points to Hillary Clinton in 2016, Donald Trump lost it by just five to Joe Biden in 2020. Next door in Zapata County, which Clinton won by 33 percentage points in 2016, voters flipped entirely for Trump. These are counties that identify as almost entirely Hispanic or Latino — and who have long been assumed to be flag-waving Democrats.

But Hispanics here, unsurprisingly, feel the threat of deportation more keenly than most, given their proximity to the border. That anxiety often manifests as a preoccupation with job security, and one’s place in the community — ideas central to the conservative worldview.

“Hispanics who are conservative culturally, socially and religiously are moving into places around the Rio Grande Valley,” Burge says. “And they’re really changing the political and social culture of those places.” Religiosity, like Republicanism, has massively increased in the region. In 2010, about 33% of Starr County claimed they were part of a religious congregation. By 2020, that number was 73%. Conservative Texas Democratic congressman Henry Cuellar describes the region as “homogenous, deeply religious, pensively patriotic, socially conservative, and it’s hurting economically.” In other words, naturally Republican.

Whether the conservative or the Evangelical turn came first is difficult to say, but they often go hand in hand, motivated by the same feeling: that the liberal, secular world is closing in on people with conservative values. And given the GOP is so clearly losing the demographic battle, it has been willing to accept Hispanics — particularly evangelical Hispanics — as all-American patriots. Though Catholicism has historically been tied to Hispanic identity, for first and second generation migrants who feel compelled to prioritise assimilation over their heritage, a fork in the road is clear: become a non-believing, big-city Democrat, or a small-town Evangelical Republican.

When asked about the inspiration behind Americano last month, two weeks after its first broadcast, CEO Ivan Garcia-Hidalgo cited the 2016 election, in which Trump made massive, surprising gains with Hispanics. Recent polling suggests that the rightward drift of the demographic, on which Trump capitalised, has continued since then. There is a growing audience of conservative Hispanics, Garcia-Hidalgo points out — and what they, and America, needed was a “Fox News in Spanish”.

The first evidence of this political shift was met with incredulity by both Left and Right. But those of us on the ground had known for some time that Hispanic-Americans were turning to the Republican Party in unprecedented numbers. In my working-class Miami neighbourhood, I consistently encountered enthusiastic Trumpists. Sure, Trump was always going to attract traditionally Right-leaning Cuban-Americans, but the fervour — and the youth — of his fanatics back in 2015 and 2016 hinted at the beginnings of a new political realignment. Trump’s unorthodox style and abrasive anti-elitist rhetoric had connected with working-class Hispanics. Friends and family who were previously apolitical or tepid independents with centrist leanings had surprisingly hopped on the Trump train.

Trump may be on the fringes again, but in 2020 he gained even more support among working-class Hispanics than he had in 2016. This was a result not purely of his own qualities: since his election, the Democratic Party had alienated another Hispanic demographic. The BLM riots of 2020 were incisive: after the fire and smoke had cleared, polling showed that Hispanics, traditionally law and order types, were against the protests and strongly rejected the Black Lives Matter organisation. At the same time, Democrats were demanding that regular Americans kneel at the altar of the new social justice religion. Many Hispanic-Americans who had previously considered themselves centrist Democrats were repelled.

They might previously have been turned off by Trump’s inflammatory language; now, they were even more turned off by the actual flames destroying American cities under the guise of wokeness. They might not have been Trump supporters in 2016, but they certainly had a rabid Trumpist tio or abuelo who was now pointing at the fires and looters and saying: “See, Trump was right. Democrats want to destroy America.” Hispanics didn’t wake up en masse, but the Right-wing shift became a phenomenon that wasn’t strictly driven by Hispanic Trump supporters.

According to Garcia-Hidalgo, “the only way to save America is with the Hispanic vote” — a  sly rhetorical move that subscribes his new network to the Trumpian view that America is under attack, while positioning patriotic Hispanics as the antidote. Garcia-Hidalgo understands that conservative Hispanics, even if they still have strong ties to their homelands, essentially identify as Americans above all else. Trump understood this, too, which is why some of his more “problematic” language directed at Hispanics — the “bad hombres” rhetoric — didn’t hurt his chances with the demographic. After all, conservative Hispanics, along with the white working-class, are the last group that is unironically patriotic.

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Trump understood the power of culture war as a binding agent. While the Democrats’ socialism-tinged rhetoric became blatantly anti-American, he continued to offer an unabashedly pro-America shtick. Since many Hispanics have ties to failed socialist countries, their American dream is a simple one: they want to work hard, make some money, and be left alone in their free time. This sentiment is perhaps the greatest tenet of classic Americanism. Hispanics do not believe that the nation is illegitimate, undermined by “whiteness” or “cis heteronormativity”, or in need of a radical restructure.

The summer of 2020 may have solidified the Trump-triggered Hispanic rightward shift, but the Democratic response to the pandemic ensured its short-term viability. According to blue-state governors, it was okay to get fresh air only if you were marching for a liberal cause or torching a small business. After the riots subsided, schools remained closed, as did the small businesses left standing after the summer of BLM. All the while, Democrats elevated disconnected bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci to deity-status and robbed the little man of all agency. Working-class Hispanics, of course, were still carrying out their essential jobs throughout the entirety of the pandemic, connected to the physical reality that the laptop class had had the luxury of abandoning.

Still, now that lockdowns and mask mandates are subsiding, will the Republican’s Hispanic gains last? Outside of Trump — and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — no politician on the Right knows how to communicate effectively with Hispanics, which is why the long-term rightward shift is anything but a guarantee. Garcia-Hidalgo understands this reality, which is probably why he announced, on the Americano show “La Politica,” that presenter Maria Herrera Mellado will be interviewing Trump today.

Of course, the success of Americano isn’t tied to Trump, per say, and nor is the growing conservatism of Hispanics. Even if Trump doesn’t run again in 2024, there’s no doubt that a Trumpian “America first” sensibility plays well with Hispanics and must hold a significant role in any outlet — or movement — if the rightward shift is to continue.

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The best way for the Republicans to sustain the rightward shift is to consolidate a fragmented Hispanic demographic. The same goes for Americano. Conservative Hispanics are accustomed to regional outlets catering to mostly localised obsessions: prior to the network’s inception, the Spanish-language news options available to them were regional outlets, like Miami’s Radio Mambi. These stations cultivate their audiences for decades, through a fine-tuned understanding of what their listeners’ desire, resulting in a family-like ecosystem in which listeners and commentators build decades-long relationships. They don’t individually pull in massive numbers, but overall listenership is in the millions.

It’s tempting for a network, or a Republican politician, based in Miami to focus on the concerns of Cuban-Americans — they, and the Mexican-Americans along the Rio Grande Valley, are the two Hispanic demographics usually cited when pundits speak of the rightward shift. But if the Right strictly focuses its efforts on the interests of these groups — which sometimes, but not always, dovetail — their rhetoric will be far too insular to reach a broad-based Hispanic coalition.

In my recent listens to Americano’s programming, it’s clear that the station is in Miami, but not of Miami, which bodes well for its future prospects. Instead of placing too much emphasis on a single Hispanic group, Americano is melding “America first” Trumpian Republicanism with the socially conservative elements that have traditionally appealed to disparate Hispanic demographics. For instance, on the night I caught the 8pm show “Entre Nosotras”, the three female presenters were joined by a former officer from the Phoenix PD to discuss the border crisis and the attendant drug scourge precipitated by President Biden’s porous border policy, which is causing a “domestic war”. The Trump-like takes on immigration — which are very popular with Hispanics — and the machinegun-like, emotionally charged delivery of the presenters will appeal to old-school talk radio veterans.

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It’s worth noting, too, that many of the network’s stars — including the presenter who will interview Trump — are strong women, which highlights the savviness of the management. Recent polling has shown that Hispanic women have shifted to the Right more than any other demographic; a show that foregrounds educated Latinas is likely to be a hit. It’s also as fine a way as any to make a splash and draw in younger Hispanics, which will be the key to expanding the rightward shift and the station’s reach; younger Hispanics are still skewing progressive.

Meanwhile, Americano’s other programming, including the first show of the day, “Amanecer Con Dios” (Waking up with God), which is hosted by a priest, and “Sabor Caribeno,” which focuses on Dominican and Puerto Rican issues, speaks to a network attempting to attract disparate Hispanic elements.

The Trump campaign was likewise able to bring together the fragmented Right-wing Hispanic coalition. What’s most impressive is that the shift occurred without the help of major networks, which often serve as messaging apparatuses for the parties. In the lead up to 2020, the Trump campaign blitzed South Florida, the Texas Rio Grande Valley, and other Hispanic-heavy areas with targeted ads painting Democrats as light on crime socialists hellbent on reshaping America. But its project certainly would’ve been easier if a national Spanish-language network existed, which is why Americano’s appearance on the scene is such an interesting development. Whether or not it succeeds will reveal whether Trumpism can hold onto Hispanic voters who feel themselves drifting to the Right.

The Republican Party, then, should be watching the network’s fortunes closely. Even if Trump doesn’t run in 2024, his brand of Republicanism is so popular with Hispanics that it will play a crucial part in the election. Meanwhile, the budding Spanish-language media ecosystem can provide an insight into what the ascendant Hispanic-American conservative coalition desires — an insight the Democrats might benefit from, too.