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Heritage Immigration Study Under Assault


RUSH: There's also a move out there -- understandably in the Democrat Party, but within certain elements of the Republican Party -- to go after, discredit, and basically blow up the Heritage Foundation study on immigration and the cost of amnesty. Remember, we made this available to you. If you wanted to go to the Heritage Foundation website the other day, earlier this week, they were giving you the report free. The website was AskHeritage.org. You could go there and you could get the whole thing downloaded, and the five-page summary was really pretty much all you needed to read.

If you didn't want the detail, the summary was just powerful, and it talked about $6.3 trillion of net cost. Well, all kinds of people -- predictably from the Democrat Party, but some in the Republican Party now -- are coming out to discredit this whole thing. They're trying to discredit the scholarship, the math. One of the criticisms is, "Those guys at Heritage, they analyze this in a static way! They didn't calculate any of the dynamics." What they mean by that is, "Wait a minute! Yeah, some of these new arrivals may end up on the welfare rolls but some of them are gonna be paying taxes, too, and that's gonna wash out whatever benefits they get."

That was the theory.

But that doesn't quite wash.

Anyway, that's just what out there.

Now, USA Today in a story here by Alan Gomez.  "One of the authors of a Heritage Foundation report that panned a Senate plan to overhaul the nation's immigration laws argued in his doctoral dissertation that immigrants generally have lower IQs than the 'native white population' of the United States." Uh-oh.  Uh, uh, uh, uh, oh.  You see now, the long knives are out for anybody at Heritage who had anything to do with this. 

"Jason Richwine, who received his doctorate in public policy from Harvard in 2009 and joined the conservative Heritage Foundation in 2012, wrote in his dissertation titled 'IQ and Immigration Policy' that immigrants in the U.S. have lower IQs than native Americans, and that that 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,' Richwine wrote, in a story first reported by The Washington Post. 'Selecting high-IQ immigrants would ameliorate these problems in the U.S., while at the same time benefiting smart potential immigrants who lack educational access in their home countries.'"

So now it's trash the messenger time.  There is no argument in this piece about whether or not Mr. Richwine's doctoral dissertation is right.  They don't even raise that question.  They are attempting to discredit Mr. Richwine and the Heritage report by pointing out that this guy, in his doctoral dissertation, suggested that immigrants to America have lower IQs than native Americans and that the difference is likely to persist over several generations.  And it's something that we ought to consider when analyzing and coming up with immigration policy.  You're not supposed to bring that kind of stuff up.  You're just not supposed to talk about it.  That's not politically correct.  Even if it's true, you are not supposed to bring it up. 

So the entire Heritage report on immigration that disagreed with the Senate Gang of Eight plan is under assault now, because one of the authors in his doctoral dissertation wrote that immigrants have lower IQs than native Americans.  They don't dispute that in the USA piece, as far as I read, they don't dispute that.  Snerdley is asking, "If it's true, shouldn't it have an impact?"  Well, maybe in a different era, yeah.  But not today.  It mighta mattered policy-wise in a different era, but today, no.  You're not even supposed to talk about this.  We're supposed to reach out.  In fact, the lower the IQ, the more welcoming we are to be to show how good we are and compassionate and how understanding.  The lower the IQ, the more welcoming we should be. 

"Richwine was one of two co-authors in a report released Monday by the Heritage Foundation that predicted a $6.3 trillion economic loss for the U.S. if a Senate immigration bill that would legalize the nation's 11 million unauthorized immigrants and bring in more foreigners on work visas becomes law.  On Thursday, the Heritage Foundation said Richwine's doctoral thesis did not factor into it's report and emphasized that the data used in the study is sound."

So Heritage says, "Whatever he wrote his doctoral thesis on had nothing to do with our report.  Our report's about money.  The IQ of arriving immigrants is not part of our study.  It's not part of our report."  Doesn't matter.  His doctoral thesis was written about this, and as such, he's automatically discredited as a bigot and a racist and whatever else, and therefore the entire Heritage report is disqualified.  That's what's underway in the Drive-By Media. 



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