Friday, May 10, 2013

Author Of Heritage Immigration Study Resigns Amid Racism Scandal

Jason Richwine, a coauthor of the Heritage Foundation’s report on the cost of the current immigration bill, has resigned after it emerged that his graduate dissertation on immigration was premised on the idea that Latinos were less intelligent than whites.

The controversy, which began after The Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews unearthed the dissertation on Latino intelligence, forced the conservative think tank into emergency damage control for the remainder of the week, when it emerged that Richwine had ties to extreme anti-immigration groups. On Friday afternoon, Heritage announced that Richwine has resigned. Heritage’s statement:

Jason Richwine let us know he’s decided to resign from his position. He’s no longer employed by Heritage. It is our long-standing policy not to discuss internal personnel matters.

Richwine’s dissertation argued that immigration policy should discriminate against low-IQ immigrants in immigration policy, but that such discrimination should be masked in the language of “high skill” and “low skill” immigration. The Heritage report, which had been widely panned on both the left and right, argued that US immigration policy should encourage high-skill immigration into the United States.

The arguments linking race and IQ in Richwine’s dissertation fit into a longstanding conservative tradition. Many major anti-immigration groups have some connections to racist pseudoscience.

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