Jason Richwine, former scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, told the Washington Examiner in an interview published today that he would not apologize for controversial assertions made in a 2009 Harvard dissertation about IQs among Hispanics. The 31-year-old had co-authored a recent report from the Heritage Foundation that estimated the cost to the United States of immigration reform as being some $6.3 trillion. The study was roundly dismissed by liberal and conservative policy groups as methodologically unsound.
"I don't apologize for any of the things that I said," Richwine continued. "But I do regret that I couldn't give more detail. And I also regret that I didn't think more about how the average lay person would perceive these things, as opposed to an academic audience."
In the abstract that crowned his 2009 dissertation, Richwine wrote, "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 US, while at the same time benefiting smart potential immigrants who lack education access in their home countries."
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He continued later in the paper, "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."
Since the media firestorm about the dissertation -- first pointed out by Washington Post blogger Dylan Matthews -- erupted, three YouTube clips released by the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank where Richwine worked before joining the Heritage Foundation, show him dismissing the idea that immigrants who aren't from Europe will assimilate to "the cultural mainstream as typified by white Americans".
"Human beings as a species are a naturally tribal group of people. We have inside, outside groups, we have families...we tend to be very attuned to very small trivial differences between groups. I don't mean to suggest I think this is a good thing. I wish we could be more universalist. But the reality is we're not going to be that way, and we shouldn't be basing policy on that, either," he said in 2008 at an AEI event called "The Importance of Race and IQ in the Immigration Debate."
"What remains to be seen is how radioactive people consider me," Richwine told the Examiner in the interview. "If people associate me with these three days for the rest of my life, it will be very difficult."
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