Red State: I’ve been warning for a while now that the John Tanton universe of Malthusian, anti-immigration groups – FAIR, NumbersUSA, and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) – are not our friends. They don’t promote conservatives ideas, and we should stay away from them.
Well, for those who weren’t convinced to ignore groups bankrolled by a Planned Parenthood local bigshot, take a look at this: Now they’re picking up the racist castoffs of legitimate groups like the Heritage Foundation.
Back in 2013, it was exposed that the Heritage Foundation was publishing the works of “alt right” Jason Richwine. He’s so deep in this stuff he wrote his Harvard dissertation on arguing that immigrants have a low IQ. This he did despite the huge amount of cultural and economic bias that would make such a finding irrelevant. IQ tests measure how good you are at the IQ test, how familiar you are with the test format and procedures, and how familiar you are with the culture that made them, not how smart you are. But then again Harvard produced Obama as a “Constitutional scholar,” too.
Well, after that report came out in May 2013, Heritage stoppped publishing his stuff. They were through with him. Arguably the most respected, accomplished, and effective conservative think tank in the nation, didn’t want anything to do with his works.
Well, guess who picked him up? John Tanton’s CIS.
They picked up the guy too racist for Heritage. But better, if you look at the numbers he cites, it’s not clear he’s even making his point. Richwine includes Social Security in his ‘welfare’ calculation, when Social Security is an insurance program you have to pay into to receive. Do most Americans on Social Security see themselves as welfare recipients?
Further, he admits that a study he relies on demonstrated there are four times as many legal immigrants as illegal (13MM vs 3MM, on Table 3, Page 4). By failing to distinguish legal and illegal immigrants in most of his paper and in his overall point, he’s just showing he has an axe to grind with foreigners, undercutting the rule of law and border security arguments we’re trying to make as conservatives.
If you’re interested, later pages show that immigrants have more kids than natives, which explains why more immigrants are eligible for programs like WIC and Medicaid. It’s not that immigrants are some drag on society. It’s that they’re having the babies that are the future of society.
And that’s why CIS is doing this. As a population control group, they want fewer babies in America. And they’re so desperate to push that agenda, they’ll associate with the “alt right” racists to get there.
