Alex Constantine - May 12, 2013
“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.” -- Heritage Foundation/American Enterprise Institute "scholar" Jason Richwine
In a recently released video from an American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation analyst Jason Richwine asserts that Latinos, as well as Native Americans, and blacks have demonstrated that they are incapable of “assimilating” and adjusting their IQs to be on par with whites, Jews and Asians.
This week Richwine’s dissertation from Harvard University was revealed to contain a passage in which he questions whether Latinos’ IQs could ever be on par with whites:
“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.”
Even Republican Senator Marco Rubio (Florida), who is a member of the Senate Gang of Eight, criticized the Heritage report as being “deeply flawed.”
Earlier this week, the Heritage Foundation published a study, co-authored by Richwine, saying that immigration reform will be costly to the U.S. taxpayer. This study has been widely criticized for its methodology. Benjamin Johnson of the American Immigration Council criticized the Heritage report for not considering the economic gains that could come from immigration reform,
“The 2013 Heritage report is a close redux of the 2007 fiscal analysis which they constructed on a foundation of faulty assumptions, and by design offers no analysis of the economic impacts of immigration reform. Instead, the authors take a very narrow look at what the newly legalized would pay in taxes over their lifetime. At the heart of the report is the assumption that everyone who lacks a college degree, including U.S. citizens, is a net drain on the American economy. In this very dark view of workers in the United States, those who build or maintain the houses, offices, cars, and roads for those with college degrees are a drag on our economy and society. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. People are more than just the taxes they pay, and honest, hardworking people are the backbone of our economy.
Here Richwine explains the differences between European and non-European immigrants. Specifically that non-European immigrants should be treated differently than European immigrants so that “we can get assimilation to work
IQ debates are not new in public policy. In 1994, Charles Murray co-authored The Bell Curve, promoting racial differences in intelligence. Murray and his co-author, Herrnstein, argued for a more “eugenically minded” immigration policy. The book was also used to criticize the impact of welfare programs and to argue that such wouldn’t have much of an impact because according to the authors IQ was responsible for poverty.