Let’s leave aside the question of whether Richwine’s thesis actually establishes what he claims it establishes, or whether the claims here are actually supported by the totality of research. What’s troublesome here is that Richwine appears to not understand what it was about his dissertation that disturbed people. He argued for a clear and persistent genetic basis to IQ, used that to argue for an immigration system based on IQ tests, and then provided political advice on how to hide the intent of that system.
Here are a few things Richwine claimed in his dissertation but leaves out of this summary:
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• Richwine, to be fair, does not rest his argument on his belief in genetic determination of differences between the races. But his argument depends entirely on his belief that the differences are “persistent,” a point that he leaves out of this summary. He writes, in perhaps the most quoted section of the dissertation, “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 leaves this striking prediction out of his summary.
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• Richwine argues in the dissertation for using language of “skill-based” immigration as a Trojan Horse for adopting IQ-based immigration policy. “One way to at least blunt the negative reaction is to drop the use of the word IQ and to replace it with skill,” he writes. “A new immigration policy could use ‘skill tests’ to find disadvantaged people with ‘raw skill.’ The tests would still be ordinary intelligence tests, but the emotional baggage that the term IQ sometimes carries with it would be much reduced.”
This has obvious political relevance, as much of the debate over the immigration bill surrounds how much immigration should be allowed of “low-skilled” versus “high-skilled” laborers. Richwine and others at the Heritage Foundation have argued for the latter at the expense of the former. Indeed, the report of Richwine’s and Robert Rector’s estimating the cost of the Senate immigration bill relied heavily on the so-called “cost” of low-skilled immigrants to reach its conclusions. Richwine’s dissertation puts these views in context, and suggests his views on IQ, and on the IQ differentials between the races, may motivate his beliefs on actual immigration bills before Congress.
Richwine is obviously welcome to believe what he wants about the permanent intellectual inferiority of Hispanic immigrants to the United States, and about the relevance of that belief to practical immigration policymaking. But he should not sugar-coat his views.
