Co-Author of New Immigration Study Says Latinos not as Intelligent
Editor's Note: On Friday, May 10, the Heritage Foundation, which earlier distanced itself from the controversial views of its senior policy analyst Jason Richwine, said Richwine had resigned from the foundation, .
Jason Richwine, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, is attracting attention because of a recently released anti-immigration study that is , including U.S. Rep. (R-Fla.), U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and anti-tax warrior Grover Norquist. The study, co-authored with Heritage fellow Robert Rector, is a reprise of Rector鈥檚 (which was ) for the foundation. Both studies claim immigration reform will cost the U.S. trillions of dollars, and both were hotly disputed.
The conservative criticism of the new study charges that it ignores immigrants鈥� upward mobility and suggests that they will always be poor. But in addition to that, a great deal of criticism from other quarters is now focusing personally on Richwine and what he has said over the years about immigrants, race and intelligence.
As the , Richwine鈥檚 2009 doctoral dissertation at Harvard makes the claim that there are deep differences in intelligence between races, and that there may be a genetic component to those differences, which, he argues, are persistent over time. He wrote that, 鈥淣o one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.鈥� What does that mean with regard to immigration into the U.S.? Richwine argues for simply testing the IQ of those who want to immigrate, excluding those with lower scores.
That wasn鈥檛 the first time he鈥檚 made statements like that. Five years ago, that when Richwine was a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) earlier in 2008, he also compared the intelligence of earlier, mainly white settlers favorably to later, mostly Latino ones. 鈥淭he argument that immigrants themselves are no different from the ones that came 100 years ago I think is quite wrong,鈥� Richwine said in a discussion at AEI that aired on C-SPAN, 鈥渁nd I think that the major difference here is ethnicity 鈥� or race, if you will. Races differ in all sorts of ways, and probably the most important way is in IQ.鈥�
He further claimed that there is a 鈥渉ierarchy of IQ,鈥� with Jews at the top followed in descending order by East Asians, non-Jewish whites, Hispanics and blacks. 鈥淕roup differences in ability,鈥� Richwine said in comments common among opponents of multiculturalism, 鈥渃ombined with a natural tribal disposition, is going to create, usually, parallel cultures within a multiracial society rather than an assimilated culture,鈥� which is 鈥渁 major, major obstacle to the assimilation of today鈥檚 immigrants, because they are not from Europe which is, I think, a major difference.鈥�
Not surprisingly, his 2008 remarks were warmly received by white nationalist blogs. Many of Richwine鈥檚 essays (see, for example, and ) have been posted on white nationalist sites since then, like and .
Richwine鈥檚 co-author on the new report, Robert Rector, has also received criticism in the past about his claims regarding immigration. In 2006, Rector released a report at the Heritage Foundation that claimed that almost 200 million people would enter the U.S. over the course of 20 years if the McCain-Kennedy immigration reform bill then under consideration passed. . Two hundred million people is nearly the entire population of Mexico and Central America. Nevertheless, within 24 hours of the release of Rector鈥檚 report, the U.S. Senate passed an amendment to the bill to sharply limit guest worker programs. Rector has also that immigrants drive up welfare costs, something that . Regarding the current immigration reform bill, that he had not 鈥渆xamined the whole bill yet鈥� but if it looks like previous bills, it will create 鈥渁 massive influx of even more unskilled workers.鈥�
Later, the Daily Beast that Richwine used as a source in his dissertation the work of the late psychology professor, , who was a former president of the white nationalist , a eugenicist organization founded in 1937. The group strives to 鈥渋mprove the character of the American people鈥� through eugenics and procreation by people of white colonial stock. According to the Daily Beast, Richwine borrowed from Rushton鈥檚 work to argue that there is a genetic component to group differences in IQ, claiming that the differentials between races 鈥減laces the average black at roughly the 16th percentile of the white IQ distribution.鈥�
