Hispanic IQ Lower Than Whites According To Co-Author Of Heritage Study; Jason Richwine Under Fire For 'Ugly Racism'

Not long after critics blasted the Heritage Foundation immigration study, which said that amensty would cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion, the foundation is under scrutiny again for alleged racism.

Heritage Foundation scholar and co-founder of the study, Jason Richwine, wrote a thesis in 2009 indicating that he believes that Hispanics have a long way to go before they are on equal terms with whites.

Richwine's views came to light Wednesday after the Washington Post criticized his comments that genetics were partially to blame for lower IQs among Hispanic immigrants.

"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," he wrote.

He wrote in his abstract that this issue with immigration would damage the labor market by saturating it with unskilled labor and poor behavior that would hurt Americans, Media Matters reported.

"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," the abstract said.

Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairman Rubén Hinojosa slammed Richwine and the Heritage Foundation, describing the statements as "ugly racism," xenophobic and not condusive to politial discourse.

"Jason Richwine's comments and general world view are a mark against the conservative community and against all fruitful discussions that would lead to comprehensive, bipartisan immigration reform," Hinojosa said.

Richwine argued these same points in 2008 on C-SPAN when he discussed the book "The New Case Against Immigration." He said that IQ levels are apt measurements of intelligence and that studies have proven a heirarchy amongst the races, which creates pivotal differences between them that are important to consider in the immigration debate.

"Decades of psychometric testing has indicated that at least in America, you have Jews with the highest average IQ, usually followed by East Asians, and then you have non-Jewish whites, Hispanics, and then blacks. These are real differences," Richwine wrote. " They're not going to go away tomorrow, and for that reason, we have to address them in our immigration discussions and our debates."

The Heritage Foundation later released a statement denouncing Richwine's words, but maintained that its study proves that amnesty would be financially problematic for Americans.

"This is not a work product of The Heritage Foundation. Its findings in no way reflect the positions of The Heritage Foundation," Heritage VP of Communications Mike Gonzalez told BuzzFeed. "Nor do the findings affect the conclusions of our study on the cost of amnesty to the U.S. taxpayer."