Ana Gonzalez-Barrera is a consultant specializing in U.S. immigration, Hispanic population trends, and survey research. She is a leading expert on Mexican immigration to the U.S., including topics such as border apprehensions, deportations, and net migration flows. From 2015 to 2022, Ana served as the manager and principal investigator for the National Survey of Latinos, where she successfully led the survey’s transition from phone to online methodology. She also pioneered the use of Survey Monkey for pre-testing new question formats in panel surveys.

Ana’s research has been instrumental in exploring complex topics like Hispanic identity, including her work estimating the size of the Afro-Latino population in the U.S. During her tenure as a senior researcher at Pew Research Center, Ana collaborated with Jeffrey S. Passel to develop a methodology for measuring immigrant flows between Mexico and the U.S., featured in the report More Mexicans Leaving Than Coming to the U.S. She also established protocols for data anonymization and dataset publication and developed Pew’s Spanish translation rules and manual, still in use today. Her expertise includes creating data visualizations, such as the first county-level maps showing the growth of the Hispanic population over time.

At KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation), Ana led the Survey on Racism, Discrimination, and Health, providing critical insights into disparities and health outcomes across diverse populations. She also contributed as a consultant to the first round of the KFF/LAT Survey of Immigrants, further extending her impact on public health and immigration research.

Ana is a Mexican-born naturalized U.S. citizen Latina who grew up in Mexico City in a blue-collar family led by a single mother, an Army nurse of Otomí heritage. Her racial identity is both Native American through her Otomí mother and White Hispanic through her Spanish-heritage father. Ana’s mother grew up in extreme poverty and faced discrimination due to her low-income and ethnic origins, which deeply influences Ana’s connection to the needs of Indigenous peoples and immigrant communities in the U.S. Ana acknowledges her privilege of resembling her White father, which allowed her to integrate into upper-class Mexican society after attending one of the top private colleges in Mexico City. She later emigrated to the U.S., where she found a society more welcoming to her gender identity, talents, and racial background.

Before her work at Pew and KFF, Ana served as director of population distribution at Mexico’s National Population Council (CONAPO) and coordinated public opinion surveys on Mexico and the Americas during her tenure at CIDE. She holds a Master of Public Policy (MPP) from the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago, where she was a Fulbright-Garcia Robles scholar. Ana is the author of numerous reports, including An Awakened Giant: The Hispanic Electorate is Likely to Double by 2030 and The Path Not Taken: Two-thirds of Legal Mexican Immigrants Are Not U.S. Citizens.