Let us consider only native-born Hispanics, U.S. citizens.

According to Steve Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, which analyzed Census Bureau statistics from 2012:

—More than one in five Hispanic citizens lives in poverty.
—One in four Hispanic-American men 25 to 55 is out of work.
—More than half of all Hispanic women 25-55 are unmarried.
—Half of all Hispanic households with children are headed by an unmarried woman, and 55 percent depend on welfare programs.

These numbers do not improve with time, as they did with the Irish, Italian, Polish, Jewish and German immigrants who poured into the United States between 1890 and 1920. Third-generation Hispanics do worse than second-generation Hispanics in all the above categories.

This is a huge community being sucked into the morass of a mammoth welfare state. Consider a typical Hispanic household with children.

It is headed by an unmarried women who receives food stamps and public housing or rent supplements to feed and house her children.

Her kids are educated free from Head Start to K-12 and fed by school breakfast and lunch programs. Should they graduate high school, Pell Grants and student loans are there for college.

For cash, mom gets welfare checks. If she takes a job, she will receive an earned income tax credit to supplement her income. If she loses her job, she can get 99 weeks of unemployment checks.

For health care, there is Medicaid and Obamacare. And like 45 percent of all Hispanic households, she has no federal income tax liability.

Why should this woman vote for a party that will cut taxes she does not pay, but reduce benefits she does receive?

Rename Romney’s gifts “government services,” writes Aaron Blake citing a Washington Post poll, and one discovers that 67 percent of Latinos favor “a larger government with more services.”

These are big government people. And why should they not be?

According to Heather Mac Donald, writing in National Review, a 2011 survey found that California Hispanics by four to one objected more to the GOP on class-warfare grounds—the party “favors only the rich,” Republicans are “selfish”—than to the GOP stand on immigration.

Writes Mac Donald: California’s Hispanics will likely prove more decisive in passing Proposition 30, to raise state income taxes to 13.3 percent, the highest level in the nation, than to Obama’s victory.

Nor is this unusual. Populist programs to stick it to the rich have always had an appeal south of the border.

There are 50 million Hispanics in America today. California is lost to the GOP. Nevada and Colorado are slipping away. Arizona and Texas are next up on the block.

With the U.S. Hispanic population in 2050 projected to reach 130 million, the acolytes of Karl Rove have their work cut out for them.