U.S. Senator Marco Rubio is worried that conservatives are putting two and two together and threatening to derail immigration reform.

U.S. Rep. Steve King, who didn’t like immigration reform to begin with, has said deal-making among legislators should slow down in the wake of the Boston bombing — in case the bomber is a foreigner.

Rubio, whose future as the savior of the Republican Party depends on immigration reform, told the Daily Caller today:

We should really be very cautious about using language that links these two things in any way. We know very little about Boston other than that it was obviously an act of terror. We don’t know who carried it out or why they carried it out, and I would caution everyone to be very careful about linking the two.

We don’t know anything about the murderer so far. Early reports of a “Saudi national” being detained by police were false. That hasn’t stopped the troglodyte forces of nativism from seeing bomb-throwing Muslims behind every bush and tree.

Fox News commentator Erik Rush has the honor of being first to call for the death of evil Muslims. Now it’s the Tea Party Nation’s Judson Phillips, who concedes that the investigation will take time but that his gut tells him that:

[T]his attack was carried out by an Islamist. It was a well-coordinated attack. In its publication, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula called for just this kind of attack.

While the government and media have fallen all over themselves to downplay this fact, there is a twenty-year-old Saudi student being detained as a “person of interest.”

Note that coincidence equals causality. Also note that the Saudi in question was never in question. But there’s no question that Rubio should be worried.

Nativism killed off the last bid for immigration reform back in 2007. Congressional Democrats wanted it. George W. Bush and the Republican leadership wanted it. But nativist conservatives said no dice.

The real question is: Can Rubio, as a Cuban-American who embodies much that nativists fear, do anything to stop it?

As Rush and Phillips demonstrate, nativists have already made up their minds about Boston. Evidence, logic, argument, and persuasion are unlikely to chance that.

John Stoehr is the managing editor of The Washington Spectator.

Image courtesy of Getty via ABC News.