ImmigrationCo-author of Heritage report: Hispanic immigrants have lower IQ than white Americans

In 2007, the Heritage Foundation issued a report which used a dynamic scoring method to show that the cost of the immigration reform measure George W. Bush wanted Congress to pass would be exorbitant. The report persuaded many Republican lawmakers to vote against a measure proposed by a Republican president, and the bill failed.

On Monday, the Heritage Foundation again issued a report which, using dynamic scoring, argues that if the Gang of Eight immigration overhaul measure passed, it would cost American taxpayers $6.3 trillion over fifty years (the report argues that over fifty years, illegal immigrants who became citizens would draw$9.4 trillion in government benefits and services, but pay only $3.1 trillion in taxes).

Economists, many of them Republicans, have criticized the report, some suggesting that both the figures it used and the way it applied dynamic scoring to the data were suspect.

Heritage, however, now has another problem on its hands. The New York Times reports that Jason Richwine, the report’s co-author, argued that Hispanic immigrants are less intelligent than white Americans.

Richwine made these arguments in a 2009 public policy Ph.D. dissertation he wrote at Harvard. In the dissertation, Richwine wrote that Hispanic immigrants generally had an I.Q. which was “substantially lower than that of the white native population” — and that the lower intelligence of immigrants should be taken into account when immigration policy is written.

“Immigrants living in the U.S. today do not have the same level of cognitive ability as natives,” Richwine, a senior policy analyst at Heritage, wrote. “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach I.Q. parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-I.Q. children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”

This is the first time Richwine has expressed his views that people of non-European origins have inferior intellectual abilities. In a 2008 American Enterprise Institute panel, Richwine said: “I do not believe that race is insurmountable, certainly not, but it definitely is a larger barrier today than it was for immigrants in the past simply because they are not from Europe.”

In 2009 he wrote a book review, expressing his disagreements with Richard E. Nisbett’s book Intelligence and How to Get It. In contrast to the argument, advanced by Nisbett, “that genes have nothing to do with the black-white IQ difference,” Richwine argued that immutable biological differences have profound policy implications that should undermine progressive social uplift programs. “[T]he more we discover how firmly ingrained our abilities, attitudes, and behaviors tend to be, the less plausible leftist social-intervention programs become,” he wrote in the review, adding later: “Biology severely limits the aspirations of social engineers.”

Immigration advocates reacted with outrage. “Whether you agree or disagree with the Heritage study, what their co-author believes is downright insulting and shameful,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, a pro-immigration group. “Heritage has really become an outlier. The rest of the country is having a 21st-century conversation about immigration reform, and Heritage is caught in 1800. I really think their entire credibility is in question.”

Heritage distanced itself from Richwine’s views on the intelligence of Hispanic immigrants. “This is not a work product of the Heritage Foundation,” Mike Gonzalez, the foundation’s vice president of communications, wrote in an e-mail statement.

Gonzalez, in a blog post, added: “We welcome a rigorous, fact-based debate on the data, methodology and conclusions of the Heritage study on the cost of amnesty. Instead, some have pointed to a Harvard dissertation written by Dr. Jason Richwine.”