Jose de la Isla: Slanting an immigration study

The matter concerning Jason Richwine, the Heritage Foundation and a misleading report about immigration is moving off the blotter far too fast. It needs a closer look.

Jason Richwine "resigned" May 10 as senior policy analyst in empirical studies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington, D.C., think-tank.

He co-wrote, with senior research fellow Robert Rector, a widely discredited policy report about immigration.

In it, they claimed unauthorized immigrants, if legalized, could cost an unbelievable $6.3 trillion in U.S. government benefits. As a professional matter, the analysis discredits the notion of cost-benefit analysis.

It was like the one economist Donald Huddle of Rice University did in the 1990s where costs, and wrong assumptions, were reported and, benefits, less so. This type of research is also offensive when it proselytizes a personal or client point of view.

Instead, empirical studies of policy should begin with a question, develop an objective methodology, and report findings in a reasonable and balanced way.

But Richwine put his thumb on the scale and mixed up the concepts of data, bias and opinion. This is a serious violation of the near-natural law of empiricism. Not even a sophomore in his first college course on how to conduct studies is allowed that. (I know. I taught that course earlier in my career.)

Oh, did I tell you Richwine has a Ph. D.? Jon Wiener of The Nation writes, "He's probably the first person ever to lose his job because of his Harvard Ph.D. dissertation."

It's not that the Ph.D. lost him the job but that one expects better from someone with that pedigree. Otherwise, what's a Ph.D. supposed to represent if not a quality-control measure when it comes to public-policy studies?

The report Richwine did with Rector came with a cascade of revelations.

One was an interesting finding by Chris Moody of Yahoo! News, who reported that Richwine contributed two stories to, a website dedicated to "radical, traditionalist and nationalist outlooks," by their own description. If Richwine were a serious researcher, then personal opinion, like a conclusion, does not take precedence over evidence. A researcher's job is not that of a prosecutor.

The Dream Action Coalition, a bipartisan lobbying group for undocumented youths, claimed Heritage president Jim DeMint showed poor judgment by not firing Richwine, and must be in agreement with those extreme views.

That's why they asked DeMint to step down "if the institution is to stand for principled conservative values," instead of condoning extreme racial views.

Apparently, Richwine's most notable defender is extremist columnist Michelle Malkin, who purred over the fact that he obtained a Ph.D. from the Harvard Kennedy School.

Richwine's 2009 dissertation asserted, according to the Washington Post, "The average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population," a difference persisting over several generations. He claimed that was sufficient basis for restricting some low-skill immigrants, especially Hispanics.

Malkin's beef with both conservative and liberal critics (she called them "drooling attack dogs") is for asking the Kennedy School why they awarded Richwine a Ph.D. and "what they plan to do in the future to prevent it from happening again." That's a good question. What?

So, if DeMint should resign for allowing such a biased researcher with flawed assumptions, weak theory and data assemblage to promote fatally flawed prejudices, who should answer at Harvard?

Malkin mentions Richwine's thesis committee at Harvard: George Borjas, Richard J. Zeckhauser and Christopher Jencks. They are the ones who should answer first.

Unless public-policy research and analysis is free of a researcher's outrageous biases and prejudices, we slouch closer to the warning attributed to Edward R. Murrow about "a nation of sheep (that) will beget a government of wolves."

And you know what that means. It leads to "a nation of sheep (that) will beget a government of wolves ruled by pigs."

Jose de la Isla writes for Hispanic Link News Service. Email him at