Why are the children of first-generation immigrants so obsessed with their parents' home country?

So, I've noticed this trend within the Latino community, especially here in the United States, since high school. However, I really started noticing it once I went to college. That trend being: Why are first-generation American Latinos, whose parents migrated here, so obsessed with identifying with their parents' home country while shitting on the U.S.?

Personally, my parents taught me to be proud of both my Salvadoran and Mexican background but also to embrace and be equally proud of being a first-generation American. That’s something I’ve always carried with great pride. I love my cultural background, but America is my country—the place where I was born and raised. This is my home. I've visited my family in Mexico and El Salvador, and I love learning more about my heritage. I carry that orgullo with me in everything I do.

BUT! I often feel like I’m the outlier. Many of my friends, who are exactly like me, identify more with their parents' home country than the one they were actually born in. One of my closest friends refuses to call himself American and insists he's Mexican, even though he has never set foot in Mexico and doesn’t even speak Spanish.

This confuses me. I understand that, in America, our political climate makes it hard to feel patriotic, but for a country that has STILL given my family and friends so much, I don’t understand this obsession with a homeland they have never even been to.

I always remember something my dad told me when he went back to El Salvador. I asked him, “Did you miss being back home?” to which he replied, “Yeah, I missed being back home, but there’s a reason I left, and I’m glad I’m not there anymore.”

I’ll end with this: A lot of people migrate to the United States to build better lives and escape the shackles of poverty. I know that’s why my parents came here. So, to see the children of those immigrants shit on the country their parents fought so hard to move to, while yearning for a country their parents desperately wanted to leave—it just confuses me.