Most Catholic possible USA

I’d say that barring any territorial changes, one could achieve a more Catholic US simply by not having the 1920 Immigration Laws. By that point, with the exception of Germany (for obvious reasons) nearly all the Protestant sources for immigration were being tapped out due to improving standards of living, but there were suddenly large numbers of Catholics fleeing the chaos of the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, the Irish War of Independence and Civil War, the formation of Poland and fighting off Lenin’s hordes, etc. Had they all been allowed to come to the US, it would have definitely made the US more Catholic (especially the Northeast... somehow...)

I think you are more likely to accomplish this if you didn't have the huge wave of immigration in the late 19th C., early 20th C. the problem is, though, that those waves of immigration were already largely catholic. So I don't think that backing off on that immigration for more immigration later is an exchange that helps any.
 
This is very true. It's not simply darker=bad there was a ton of nuance and contradiction and many (perhaps most) times had more to do with money, connections, and perceived class than race or religion. Perhaps a better way to look at it is that money makes you "whiter" and the Mexican upper class had a lot of money.

A very good example of this, that is still true to this day, is that hispanics will increasingly tend to identify as white as generations go by and their personal incomes go up. We could go into some long and tortured rabbit holes about this, but it does demonstrate a general proclivity towards assimilation on both sides of this relatively artificial divide.
 
To add my two cents on the matter of assimilation of vast numbers of Hispanics, I think it would be pretty swift and self-fulfilling. As I already noted it was generally already accepted and encouraged that there would be be extensive inter-mixing; the experience of New Mexico and other areas bares this out as a model for Mexico. You'd probably see more than a few war brides and then as a gradual stream of settlers come into Mexico or soldiers staying intermarrying with the locals. As for the matter of Mexico's upper classes, Winfield Scott suggested in his own correspondences that they were in favor of annexation:

[34] However, two years later, after the treaty of peace was signed at Guadaloupe on Feb. 2, 1848, and sixteen days later, after he was superceded in the command of the army by Butler, he could write, "Two fifths of the Mexican population, including more than half of the Congress, were desirous of annexation to the US, and, as a stepping stone, wished to make me president ad interim.'"

The United States Army in Mexico City, by Edward S. Wallace (Military Affairs, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Autumn, 1949), pp. 158-166) also states a desire for annexation among the well off of Mexico City, and goes into detail about the relationships cultivated between American soldiers and Mexican civilians.
 
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