Richwine’s Immigration IQ Dissertation Filled with References to Pioneer Fund “Race Realists”

They say if you start asking questions and do a little more digging, eventually you can begin to connect the dots. Such was the case when we shared the news that the family foundations of the Vice Chairman of the Heritage Foundation were donating serious money to the anti-immigration organizations of the John Tanton Network. There was a time, around seven years ago, when Heritage was actually a bit more moderate on immigration, but Heritage will now be forever known as the group that published a flawed immigration study last week co-authored by a individual who published a 2009 Harvard dissertation “proving” that new Latino immigrants have a lesser IQ that native-born Americans and previous waves of immigrants.

The whole Jason Richwine Affair speaks to individuals and organizations who feel that the “browning of America” will destroy the very fabric of this country. Now, a May 15 post by NewComm.org raises additional questions about Richwine’s intentions and what his academic biases are. The NewComm post begins by summarizing the connections between Tanton and Jared Taylor, two individuals who have received millions from the Pioneer Fund, which, according to the post, “since the late 1930s,” is a “virulently racist foundation” that  “has sought to fund the work of ‘race realists’ invested in proving the genetic superiority of white-European Americans and promoting eugenics.”

How then does this all relate to Richwine?

NewComm did a little more digging. It examined Richwine’s dissertation and the references he makes in his work. Here is what they found:

On its website, Pioneer writes, “The researchers associated with Pioneer tend to be ‘race-realists’,” a term Taylor has long promoted. From this, a careful scan of Richwine’s list of references reveals many such “realists:”

• 22 publications penned by past Pioneer grantees and/or Directors (e.g. Arthur Jensen, Jean Phillipe Rushton, Richard Lynn)
• 13 publications that Pioneer directly funded
• all of which contribute to a total of 19 authors and 37 works sourced that are “about the Pioneer Fund” itself and/or the foundation directly funded the writing for

Acknowledgment of these influences leads one to recognize that, until recently, the ascending arc of Richwine’s career has been transparently steeped in a legacy of individuals personally indebted to Pioneer’s millions.

Angered by the “tough-sledding” the Ivy League alum is presently enduring, Taylor extended Richwine an empathy similar to what Tanton offered him in 1990. In a piece posted last week on American Renaissance, Taylor positions Richwine in a lineage of fellow “race-realists” who have been banished to the extremist fringes of American politics:

“Because you [Conservatives] are lapdogs, Jason Richwine joins a distinguished group of men fired by ‘conservatives:’ Joe Sobran, Sam Francis [of Council of Conservative Citizens], Scott McConnell [on FAIR’s Advisory Board/President of Neil A. McConnell Foundation], John Derbyshire [now of VDARE], Robert Weissberg, Kevin Lamb [who works for Tanton], Frank Borzellieri, Leif Parsell [….] John O’Sullivan [former Director of VDARE], Peter Brimelow [founder of VDARE, who received funding from Tanton & Pioneer], James Watson, and Patrick Buchanan have also gotten some form of the ax for excessive truth-telling.”

And so, if Richwine’s dissertation is to be remembered as anything beyond a moment of “excessive truth-telling” that has wrought deserved havoc for Heritage, “IQ & Immigration Policy” must be regarded for what it is–a serious academic meditation on the belief that one’s genetic make-up predetermines one’s worth to society.

The culturally-biased practice of IQ testing–not unlike how poll taxes and literacy tests were once used to bar so many from voting booths–has been used throughout our country’s history as a Swiss Army knife by “race-realists” and anti-immigrant activists seeking to carve out proof that some immigrants and minorities (“high-skilled”/high-IQ) are purely more desirable than others (“low-skilled”/low-IQ). Richwine’s work, for Harvard and Heritage, captures the aforementioned legacies of bigotry in the same opaquely codified ivory of elite academia and political expertise that Pioneer’s Directors have long imbibed and hoped to more widely imbue.

How many coincidences does one need to start asking serious questions about all this? Do Americans not realize that there is a very well-funded group of individuals who continue to play upon the unfounded racial fears?

And seriously people, you all know that “Latino” is not a race, right?