The Spirit Moves Them

Via Ambinder, here’s an interesting bit of information culled from Mark Penn that relates nicely to this post:

There are 10 million Protestant Hispanics in the U.S. today. 90 percent of them adhere to a variant of Pentecostalism. It was this subgroup of Latinos who helped George W. Bush increase his margin among Hispanics in 2004 — “the percentage of Bush voters among Hispanic Catholics remained exactly the same.” Penn’s own surveys suggest that Protestant Latinos are largely values voters; Catholic Latinos are much more likely to respond to economic issues.

If the GOP wants to work Rovian electoral “magic” via bad immigration policy, they would need to get on the ball and begin bringing in Guatemalans by the hundreds of thousands, since Guatemala has become something like 30% Pentecostal.  They would also have to somehow manage to keep the non-Protestant Hispanics out.  The point is that most of the Hispanics coming here are not “natural” GOP voters, just as most of the Hispanic Catholics already here are not.