Hispanic Congressional Caucus Blasts Heritage Report

On Wednesday, Rep. Rubén Hinojosa, D-Texas, the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, blasted the Heritage Foundation after it was revealed one of the authors of a controversial study on immigration released earlier this week had once written a dissertation that warned of the lower intellectual capacity of immigrants, the Hill reports.

After learning of the existence of the dissertation, Hinojosa called the group’s study “ugly racism and xenophobia dressed up in economic hyperbole.”

Jason Richwine is one of the authors of a Heritage study that concluded giving a path to citizenship to the 11 million immigrants estimated to be in the U.S. illegally would cost the country $6.3 trillion over their lifetimes.

In his 2009 doctoral dissertation, Richwine pointed to inferior genetics as part of the reason “no one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites.”

“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,” Richwine wrote.

“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 U.S., while at the same time benefiting smart potential immigrants who lack educational access in their home countries.”

Hinojosa said Richwine’s comments “and general world view are a mark against the conservative community and against all fruitful discussions that would lead to comprehensive, bipartisan immigration reform.”

“The Heritage Foundation has always been a stalwart of conservatism, but this is common-place, ugly racism and xenophobia dressed up in economic hyperbole,” Hinojosa said.

I urge everyone in the conservative community to step up and speak out against this disgraceful, so-called report.”

Heritage spokesman Mike Gonzalez attempted to disassociate the conservative think tank from the dissertation, stressing Richwine’s previous writings have nothing to do with the positions of the foundation and shouldn’t have any bearing on how people view the findings of the immigration study.

“This is not a work product of The Heritage Foundation,” Gonzalez said.

“Its findings in no way reflect the positions of The Heritage Foundation. Nor do the findings affect the conclusions of our study on the cost of amnesty to the U.S. taxpayer.”