On Wednesday, a group of immigrant activists jointly organized by the Center for Community Change and Fair Immigration Reform Movement demanded former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) to resign as president of the Heritage Foundation. DeMint was an enthusiastic leader at the forefront of a flawed immigration study co-authored by Jason Richwine who argued that Hispanics have lower genetic IQ in his doctoral thesis.

While conservatives leaders and organizations have roundly criticized the Heritage study, Jim DeMint has not said anything about the controversial former employee. The activists take DeMint’s silence as a sign of his solidarity with Richwine’s racially tinged history. Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change stated in an interview with Chris Hayes, “the issue is that [Richwine] was hired knowingly by Heritage with these views way out of the mainstream by the pillar institution of modern Conservatism in America.”

Carrying pink slips and a banner, the activists approached DeMint as he exited the Heritage Foundation, but he quickly slipped back in through another door. As they stacked pink slips in front of the doors of the Heritage Foundation, they shouted “Jim DeMint Has Got to Go!” Watch it:

When the Heritage Foundation released its report claiming that the new immigration legislation – erroneously called amnesty in the report – would cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion, they probably didn’t expect it to go over as poorly as it did.

Not only did conservative politicians, think tanks, and economists (not to mention progressives) fight back against the “data” in the report, it also came to light that the report’s author Jason Richwine previously insisted that non-white immigrants, particularly Latinos, have a genetically lower IQ than their white counterparts. Such blatant support for a racism-based argument against immigration chased away most remaining champions of the Heritage-Richwine report. The backlash was so intense that Richwine “resigned “ his position from the conservative think tank.

And yet, the John Tanton Network of anti-immigrant organizations has not condemned Richwine who appears to be an old school eugenicist. The three main organizations associated with Tanton – NumbersUSA, Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), and Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) – all include as part of their mission statements the assertion that they are pro-immigrant or supportive of legal immigrants. Based on their collective reaction to Richwine, however, this claim is categorically untrue.

Since Richwine’s resignation, NumbersUSA has maintained its blog posts on the Heritage report, has left up tweets supporting and promoting it, and has not spoken out against Richwine or the ideals he holds.

NumbersUSA insists that it supports immigration and immigrants but is against illegal immigration. That position is suspect given founder and president Roy Beck’s history of work with white nationalist publications like The Social Contract and VDARE. It seems like condemning Richwine’s IQ argument would be a good way to prove that the organization is not, in fact, anti-immigrant.

It appears as though the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s original post about the report on FAIRus.org has been scrubbed down to simply say “Heritage Foundation: Amnesty to cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion!” One can assume that the original url did not display a page so bereft of language, graphics, or any opinion whatsoever.

FAIR has not commented on Richwine’s history of writing anti-Latino policy prescriptions, even though its website insists that “FAIR believes America can and must have an immigration policy that is nondiscriminatory.” FAIR’s post on Facebook is still up and circulating among its supporters and their initial tweet promoting the report is still live.

Center for Immigration Studies’ (CIS) president Mark Krikorian tweeted links to the Heritage report and CIS retweeted him, but other than this small Twitter effort the organization was silent on the report and the subsequent controversy. Krikorian is a frequent contributor to National Review Online but while he has not come out in support of or against Heritage or Richwine, his colleague (and former McCain campaign staffer) economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin did write a takedown of the Heritage report at NRO.

CIS bills itself as “low-immigration, pro-immigrant” but still doesn’t see itself as pro-immigrant enough to officially state that it is repugnant to say that immigrants are genetically inferior to white Americans.

If these organizations are truly pro-immigrant, they must speak out against Richwine’s assertions. Not doing so is an implicit endorsement of those sentiments.

Our guest blogger is Melinda Warner, a Senior Advisor with Fernandez Advisors where she directs their research initiatives.

Last week, a coauthor of the Heritage Foundation’s shoddy immigration report, Jason Richwine, resigned after it emerged that his PhD dissertation argued that Latinos and blacks were genetically intellectual inferior to white people. Monday morning, the flagship conservative journal National Review published a piece arguing that Richwine’s work was legitimate academic inquiry and that Heritage should have defended the dissertation rather than distancing itself from it.

The piece, authored by deputy managing editor Robert VerBruggen, argues that Richwine’s dissertation was “most certainly competently executed,” and that Richwine’s research on IQ helps support “much of the actual data” in giving “reason for concern” about “Hispanic assimilation.” That makes it wrong to call Richwine’s dissertation racist, in VerBruggen’s view:

These sorts of debates are resolved by having scholars take different views, conduct research, and make their case, confident that their current and future “educational institutions” will not punish them for doing so. Indeed, today genome research is progressing at a rapid clip, with scientists worldwide making fascinating discoveries almost constantly. (Soon, I hope, this work will render the research Richwine cites, much of which is decades old, obsolete.) The Left would like to cut this process off, expelling from polite society — with the help of a conservative think tank in this case — any researcher who dares to defend the hereditarian view.

The Left’s labeling of Richwine’s argument as “racist” is especially dangerous. In modern America it is axiomatic that “racism,” whatever it is, is wrong — and this is a good thing. It therefore is a mistake to define racism to include falsifiable hypotheses in addition to racial hatred. If Richwine’s view is racist, what are we to do if it turns out to be correct?

VerBruggen’s standard for racism doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The hypothesis that “rich Jews control the media” is “falsifiable” in VerBruggen’s sense, as it’s a claim about what is true in the world, but it’s unquestionably anti-Semitic to assert it. Ditto with the claim that “black people are on-average lazier” or “Asians are on-average sneakier” — these are racist claims, rooted in centuries of pernicious stereotyping, yet they are legitimate subjects for academic inquiry by VerBruggen’s lights.

Moreover, VerBruggen’s claim that Richwine’s dissertation is good research is disputed by independent experts. “I am stunned by the lack of rigor and intellectual depth evinced by Richwine’s dissertation,” wrote Diego von Vacano, a political scientist who studies race and Hispanic identity. “Such shoddy work should not easily pass at the doctoral level — or any level for that matter.” Dan Drezner, a professor of international relations who reviewed Richwine’s research, wrote that “key terms are poorly defined, auxiliary assumptions abound, and the literature I’m familiar with that is cited as authoritative is, well, not good.”

These criticisms are not hard to substantiate. Richwine’s dissertation fails to sufficiently define “Hispanic” or “black” or explain how either such genetically diverse, socially defined groupings can meaningfully track the genetically-inherited components of IQ. He dismisses the idea that entrenched poverty and racism could stymie Hispanic acheivement by citing the success of Asian immigrants in the United States, skating over the gulf in differences between both different Asian immigrant groups at different times and “Asians” and “Hispanics” in some broader sense. He doesn’t respond to the wealth of academic criticism of current intelligence testing metrics. And Richwine takes much of the data on IQ as face-value reliable, a claim that’s dubious for several reasons.

VerBruggen’s insistence that bad research linking race and IQ is simply the truth plays into a longstanding conservative tradition, wherein conservatives defend race and IQ research that provides support for their policy preferences. In this case, Richwine’s dissertation makes the case for limiting immigration to high IQ individuals, a position that VerBruggen appears compelled by and one that tracks well with the general conservative preference for “high-skill” immigration. Richwine explicitly draws a line between “high IQ immigration” and “high skill immigration” in the dissertation.

National Review‘s editors wrote that “the Heritage analysis [Richwine coauthored] is the best available” analysis of the cost of the immigration bill.

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.

The Heritage Foundation’s analysis of the economic consequences of immigration reform uses absurd methodology to come to conclusions entirely at odds with the organization’s own findings in 2006. Perhaps one explanation for this incoherence is that one of the paper’s coauthors, a new hire, opposes Hispanic immigration because he thinks Latinos are stupid.

Jason Richwine joined Heritage in 2010, after finishing his PhD in Public Policy in 2009. The Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews dug up Richwine’s dissertation, which was titled “IQ And Immigration.” In it, Richwine argues that Hispanics have and will always have lower IQs than whites. Matthews summarizes:

Richwine’s dissertation asserts that there are deep-set differentials in intelligence between races. While it’s clear he thinks it is partly due to genetics — ‘the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in IQ’ — he argues the most important thing is that the differences in group IQs are persistent, for whatever reason. He writes, ‘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.‘

Richwine concludes from this that American immigration policy should encourage high IQ individuals to immigrate, but limit low IQ immigration: as he puts it, “I believe there is a strong case for IQ selection, since it is theoretically a win-win for the U.S. and potential immigrants.” Since this eugenic language is politically toxic, Richwine advocates dressing it up in the language of “high skill” and “low skill” immigration. As Matthews details, the Heritage report does exactly that.

The study of race and intelligence has long been a problematic area for conservatives. In 1994, conservative pundit Charles Murray wrote a book called The Bell Curve, whose argument that blacks are on-average less intelligent than whites kicked off a critical firestorm. Conservatives since have generally defended Murray (who currently works at the American Enterprise Institute), occasionally citing him to get to some unsavory conclusions. Recently published research does not support the idea that there is an identifiably racial IQ gap, and the difficulty in defining “race” as a biological term makes it hard to pin down an appropriate methodology for studying the question in the first place.

Richwine is not the only author of the Heritage report with questionable views. Robert Rector, the paper’s lead author, was the source for then candidate Romney’s racially charged attack on President Obama’s welfare policy, and has spent his career dismissing the idea that poverty hurts people. On Tuesday, Rector admitted he hadn’t read the whole immigration bill before coauthoring his analysis of it with Richwine.

Robert Rector, the lead author of the Heritage Foundation’s widely panned immigration study, stood by his claim Tuesday that immigration reform would cost taxpayers a “minimum” $6.3 trillion, even as he admitted, “I have not examined the whole bill yet.”

In the meantime, Rector has fielded criticism from every conservative corner. Grover Norquist’s Americans For Tax Reform, American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, and Republicans Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Jeff Flake, and Haley Barbour have all had sharp critiques of the report.

These critics charge that he ignores the upward mobility of legalized immigrants, as well as the contributions of highly educated, skilled immigrants. That did not stop him from speculating that the parts of the bill he missed would still mean a “tidal wave” of low-skilled workers:

I have not examined the whole bill yet. I will and if the bill looks like any other comprehensive bill that we’ve ever had, what this bill will have is a massive influx of even more unskilled immigrants. That will replicate this problem all over again.

Watch it:

When asked on CNBC if his study includes “an economic growth component, because part of this bill will be braniacs, entrepreneurs, engineers, and other innovators,” Rector replied, “No. We’ve only looked in the study at the cost of amnesty.”

The amount of pushback appears to have unnerved Rector. In the 24 hours since the study was published, Rector now claims his critics are not conservatives at all and do not understand his work. “Anyone who engages in that kind of sham is not a conservative and not a fiscal conservative,” he said. And he singled out Norquist’s criticism in particular, saying, “you tell me what’s wrong with those numbers, Grover.” In fact, Norquist explained exactly why he thinks the numbers are wrong earlier today.