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Jason Richwine, the coauthor of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s controversial study on the supposed $6.3 trillion cost of comprehensive immigration reform, has received much attention and criticism for his 2009 Harvard dissertation that argued there was “a genetic component” to racial disparities in IQ. But this dissertation wasn’t the first time Richwine had expressed such views publicly. In 2008, he told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute that “major” ethnic or racial differences in intelligence between the Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants who flocked to the United States at the turn of the 20th century and the immigrants coming to the US today justified severely restricting immigration.

Richwine’s remarks, which he made as a resident fellow at AEI, did not receive much public notice at the time, but they go beyond the arguments presented in his 2009 dissertation. In that dissertation, “IQ and Immigration Policy,” which was first reported by Dylan Matthews of the Washington Post, Richwine argued for restricting immigration based on IQ differences, which he believes are partially the result of genetic differences between ethnic groups. In the dissertation’s acknowledgements, Richwine wrote that “no one was more influential” than AEI scholar Charles Murray, coauthor of the much-criticized book The Bell Curve, which argued that racial disparities in IQ are partially the result of genetic differences between races. After the Post broke the story about the dissertation, the Heritage Foundation distanced itself from Richwine’s immigration reform study.

At the 2008 talk, Richwine said, “I do not believe that race is insurmountable, certainly not, but it definitely is a larger barrier today than it was for immigrants in the past simply because they are not from Europe.” The 2008 AEI panel focused on a book by immigration reform opponent Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors strict limits on all immigration. Krikorian’s book, The New Case Against Immigration, Both Legal and Illegal, began with Krikorian stating that the difference between modern immigration and immigration at the turn of the century “is not the characteristics of the newcomers but the characteristics of our society.”

Richwine firmly disagreed with part of Krikorian’s assessment. The “major difference,” he said, was the race of the immigrants: “There are real differences between groups.” He contended that today’s nonwhite immigrants are dumber. “Race is different in all sorts of ways, and probably the most important way is in IQ,” he said. “Decades of psychometric testing has indicated that at least in America, you have Jews with the highest average IQ, usually followed by East Asians, then you have non-Jewish whites, Hispanics, and then blacks. These are real differences, and they’re not going to go away tomorrow, and for that reason we have to address them in our immigration discussions and our debates.”

After he made his remarks in 2008, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that “Richwine’s remarks were warmly received on white nationalist blogs.”

During the AEI panel, Richwine cited history to justify his views on race and assimilation. The assimilation of Irish, Italians, and Jews, Richwine said, didn’t mean that today’s nonwhite immigrants would also assimilate. “I think that there are a number of counterexamples here already in America. We have blacks, we have American Indians, and even early Mexican Americans, who have been living in the country for a long time, and who have not assimilated into the cultural mainstream as typified by white Americans,” Richwine said. “Obviously I think with blacks we know that, at least in my opinion, I think black and white culture has if anything has diverged in the last 50 years rather than converged. American Indians have been here a long time, and we still have Indian reservations.”

Richwine closed his remarks with what he called a thought experiment: “Imagine if early immigrants in the 20th century—say, the Italians, the Poles, the Jews, the Irish. Imagine if we replaced them with say, Australian Aborigines, Pakistanis, and Cambodians. Can we really say with any kind of rational argument that they today would be considered absolutely indistinguishable from the white majority, that there would be no cultural differences between them? I think it’s very difficult to make that argument.” No one at the event seemed bothered by Richwine’s remarks—in fact, when he was finished, he received a smattering of applause from the audience.

Richard Alba, a sociology professor at the City University of New York and an author of several books on race and assimilation, called Richwine’s remarks “appalling.”

“Richwine conveniently overlooks the very disparate treatment that the groups he is singling out as nonwhite received both during their entry to US society and afterwards,” Alba says. “This treatment has placed them in a very different situation from that of immigrants, whether we speak of the immigrants of a century ago or of today. Present-day immigrants are analogous to the immigrants of a century ago. In some ways, many are better off than those immigrants.” Alba also notes that IQ tests were initially used to “prove” that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe in the early 20th century were intellectually inferior to other whites. “This inferiority was supposedly demonstrated even for Jews,” he says. “As we know, the descendants of these supposedly low-IQ immigrant groups have turned out to be very successful.”

At the 2008 event, even Krikorian disputed Richwine’s argument. “The idea that European immigration somehow always represented something that was compatible and consistent and part of ‘the we’ is an anachronism,” he says. “It’s looking at America in 1965 and assuming that’s what we always were. The fact is that second-generation Hispanic and Asian kids, who again, and this is the qualifier, who are middle class, speaking without an accent, have a job, they’re white. The real divide in our society has always been black vs. nonblack, not white vs. nonwhite. And that is the challenge that we still face.”

One of the criticisms of the Heritage study that Richwine coauthored with fellow Heritage scholar Robert Rector was that it undercounted current and future education levels of undocumented immigrants and likely increases in earnings stemming from legalization. That conclusion may be informed by Richwine’s views on the intelligence of non-European immigrants.

Heritage says Richwine is “not available for interviews.” But the group posted this statement on their website Wednesday afternoon: “We believe that every person is created equal and that everyone should have equal opportunity to reach the ladder of success and climb as high as they can dream.”

Jason Richwine would likely disagree with that sentiment.

Here is the full transcript of Richwine’s statement at the 2008 event: