Anti-immigrant Heritage study co-author a believer in racist pseudo-science

WonkBlog: The Heritage Foundation made something of a splash with its study suggesting that immigration reform will cost the public trillions. Past work by one of its co-authors helps put that piece in context.

Jason Richwine is relatively new to the think tank world. He received his PhD in public policy from Harvard in 2009, and joined Heritage after a brief stay at the American Enterprise Institute. Richwine’s doctoral dissertation is titled “IQ and Immigration Policy”; the contents are well summarized in the dissertation abstract:

The statistical construct known as IQ can reliably estimate general mental ability, or intelligence. The average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population, and the difference is likely to persist over several generations. The consequences are a lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low-IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust, and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market. Selecting high-IQ immigrants would ameliorate these problems in the U.S., while at the same time benefiting smart potential immigrants who lack educational access in their home countries.

Richwine’s dissertation asserts that there are deep-set differentials in intelligence between races. While it’s clear he thinks it is partly due to genetics — “the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in IQ” — he argues the most important thing is that the differences in group IQs are persistent, for whatever reason. He writes, “No 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.”

This is important, since this would seem to be one of the underpinnings to the argument that immigration reform will cost trillions of dollars.

“The main premise of the heavily disputed Heritage Study is that undocumented immigrants will be unable to reach education and income levels high enough to make them a net plus to the economy, even after several generations,” reports Talking Points Memo’s Benjy Sarlin. The Heritage study doesn’t come right out and say that Latinos are too dumb for America, but it would seem that’s only because it would rightly doom the study’s credibility.

Once again, we see that the Heritage Foundation is a bullshit factory and this particular variety of bullshit can be classified as “fullblown racist.”