After the Heritage Foundation’s “study” on immigration policy was widely panned, from observers across the political spectrum, it was only a matter of time before its authors came under scrutiny. As we discussed yesterday, Jason Richwine, who co-authored the report and worked on its quantitative elements, has quite an interesting background.
As it turns out, Richwine’s post-graduate research sounds a bit like eugenics — he wrote that he believes there’s evidence to support “a genetic component to group differences in IQ,” and that whites are more intelligent than people of color.
But that’s not all Richwine believes. Adam Serwer reports today:
In 2008, he told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute that “major” ethnic or racial differences in intelligence between the Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants who flocked to the United States at the turn of the 20th century and the immigrants coming to the US today justified severely restricting immigration.
Richwine’s remarks, which he made as a resident fellow at AEI, did not receive much public notice at the time, but they go beyond the arguments presented in his 2009 dissertation.
In Richwine’s vision, there are “real differences between groups,” with Jews on top, followed by “East Asians, then you have non-Jewish whites, Hispanics, and then blacks.” These “differences” in intelligence, Richwine argued, should help shape U.S. immigration policy.
And in case this isn’t quite nauseating enough, Chris Moody reports that Richwine also contributed published pieces to a white nationalist website.
This is the guy who helped write the Heritage Foundation’s “study” on comprehensive immigration reform — the document anti-reform Republicans are supposed to rely on to defeat the bipartisan bill.
Oh my.
Make no mistake: the task for reform’s opponents just got more difficult. It’s not a fair, either/or dynamic, but it’s easy to imagine the debate shaping up into those who side with the bipartisan Gang of Eight and the American mainstream vs. those who side with the Heritage Foundation and its report’s scandalous co-author.
The place for in-depth analysis, commentary and informed perspectives.