Luckily, all workers from other countries can cut it. That’s the genius of amnesty.

Here’s what the sneering amnesty-shill Beltway Republican set sounds like when it’s allowed to speak on background:

Fresco and Gonzalez helped to unlock the deal with labor and the Chamber of Commerce. The two biggest sticking points were wages for foreign workers (the unions wanted them to be higher) and the objections of the Building and Construction Trades union, which argues that plenty of Americans are looking for this kind of work.

“Rubio sided with the Chamber against the construction workers. ‘There are American workers who, for lack of a better term, can’t cut it,’ a Rubio aide told me. ‘There shouldn’t be a presumption that every American worker is a star performer. There are people who just can’t get it, can’t do it, don’t want to do it. And so you can’t obviously discuss that publicly.’

That’s from Ryan Lizza’s bombshell New Yorker piece, which is unfortunately behind a reg wall. The first few paragraphs are visible at the link, though, and feature a warm John McCain remembrance of Ted Kennedy, in case you weren’t excited enough about immigration reform yet. Remind me again: Passing the Gang of Eight bill is, theoretically, supposed to increase our chances of winning, right? Is “some of you can’t cut it” a message that sounds like a winner in, say, Ohio or Pennsylvania or any of the other 48 states where middle-class voters are already nervous about competition for jobs turning even fiercer in a high-unemployment economy?

Rubio’s spokesman issued the obligatory statement yesterday insisting that the mystery aide doesn’t speak for Rubio, who’s never said anything like “some of you can’t cut it” publicly and allegedly doesn’t agree with it. Who does the aide speak for then? Victor Davis Hanson says there’s a constituency:

Instead, employers want a continuing influx of young workers who will undercut the wages of American citizens. That the bargaining power of other minorities, Latino- and African-American citizens especially, is undercut by illegal labor matters little. How odd that elite Republicans pander to Latino grandees to win perhaps 35 percent of the Latino vote; that the party garners no more than 5 percent of the much larger African-American vote is never discussed. In the bizarre logic of the Republican elite, you must cater to the Hispanic elite in order to siphon votes from the liberal Latino bloc, while the much more important black demographic is simply written off. Is there one Republican politician who is more worried about the plight of unemployed African-American citizens than he is about granting amnesty to foreign nationals who broke U.S. laws to come here?

Employers do not care that the presence of 11 million illegal aliens has driven down entry-level wages. They are not concerned about the depressing cycle of illegal-immigrant labor: The young male from Latin America works extraordinarily hard for 20 years. But by the time he’s 40, he is married with children, and discovering that without education, English, or skill sets, he has no way forward.

Arms and backs that were near superhuman at 25 are often shot at 50. When the 45-year-old illegal alien can no longer pick, or cook, or rake as he once did, the employer loses interest, and the state steps in to provide him with rough parity through subsidies for housing, health care, food, and legal assistance, and meanwhile it has been educating his children. Because second-generation immigrants are deemed less industrious than their worn-out fathers and mothers — and Hispanic males in California graduate from high school at little more than a 60 percent rate — the need arises for another round of young hardy workers from Latin America.

In other words, notes Mark Krikorian, the pro-amnesty GOP prefers to solve the problem of class polarization in America described in Charles Murray’s latest book by simply importing a more desperate underclass every 20 years or so. But who knows? Come 2035, America’s native underclass may be even more desperate than its southern neighbor’s. That’s the ultimate “solution” to the amnesty problem, apparently.

The quote from the Rubio aide isn’t even the biggest scoop in Lizza’s piece, per the excerpts at Politico. The big scoop, which should matter more to border hawks than the “can’t cut it” quote, is that “no decisions are being made” on the Gang of Eight bill without talking to the White House about it first according to a senior administration official. In a sane world, that wouldn’t qualify as a scoop — of course Obama’s helping to nurse a bill this Democrat-friendly through the legislative process — but even now, I sense, there’s a lingering suspicion among some righties that O secretly wants the bill to fail so that he can go around calling Republicans Latino-haters next summer. I won’t bore you with my rehash of why it’s silly to think that since I’ve done it so many times before; the bottom line is O will find ways to call Republicans Latino-haters even if the bill passes, so why should he try to sabotage it? In fact, Lizza’s White House source threatened to demagogue the GOP to Latinos if they don’t pass the bill now. So much for sabotage.