The IQ Test Jason Richwine's friends warned him about researching connections between race and intelligence years ago. The Heritage Foundation scholar should have listened.

David Weigel:

Four years ago, long before he'd join the Heritage Foundation, before Marco Rubio was even in the Senate, Jason Richwine armed a time bomb. A three-member panel at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government accepted Richwine's thesis, titled "IQ and Immigration Policy." In it, Richwine provided statistical evidence that Hispanic immigrants, even after several generations, had lower IQs than non-Hispanic whites. Immigration reformers were fools if they didn't grapple with that.

"Visceral opposition to IQ selection can sometimes generate sensationalistic claims--for example, that this is an attempt to revive social Darwinism, eugenics, racism, etc," wrote Richwine. "Nothing of that sort is true. ... an IQ selection system could utilize individual intelligence test scores without any resort to generalizations."

This week, Heritage released a damning estimate of the immigration bill, co-authored by Richwine. The new study was all about cost, totally eliding the IQ issues that Richwine had mastered, but it didn't matter after Washington Post reporter Dylan Matthews found the dissertation. Heritage hurried to denounce it--"its findings in no way reflect the positions of The Heritage Foundation"--and Richwine has ducked any more questions from the press.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at May 15, 2013 1:52 AM
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