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Commenting last week on the Heritage Foundation’s despicable firing of Jason Richwine, VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow wrote:

The facts about the differing average IQ levels of the various post-1965 immigrant streams have been settled science for many years. The original draft of my huge 1992 National Review cover story Time to Rethink Immigration, which eventually resulted in my 1995 book Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, contained a discussion of IQ and immigration policy, alluding to Richard J. Herrnstein's and Charles Murray's book The Bell Curve, which I knew was in preparation. The reaction of my dear friend John O'Sullivan, NR's Editor in those happy days, was very instructive. Not only did he insist on cutting out the discussion, but he also hunted down every copy of the original draft in NR's office and had them destroyed. His argument was that any mention of IQ or heredity at all would result in the issue monopolizing all response to my article, plunging the rest of my very broad case against contemporary immigration policy irretrievably into the dark.

At the time, I accepted that he was right. But I now think that, had we fought that battle then, Jason Richwine might still be able to support his family today—and, who knows, American might be a very different place.

Brimelow also mentioned but declined to press the immigration-IQ linkage in Alien Nation. He wrote in a footnote on Page 57:

As this book was in galleys, the greatest intellectual uproar for many years was caused by the publication of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life  (Free Press), which argued that scientific evidence shows human intelligence exists in a measurable way, is profoundly important in society, is largely hereditary, and differs, on average, between races. In a little-noticed passage, Herrnstein and Murray blamed the 1965 Immigration Act for a sharp deterioration in immigrant quality. They estimated that the current influx has an average IQ of 95, at least 5 points below the white American mean. If they are right, of course, this suggests the consequences of current policy are far more disastrous than anything argued in this book. However, I figure I’ve taken enough risks already and merely report their view for what it is worth. There are quite enough reasons to worry about immigration without using Herrnstein and Murray's work. Would-be demagogues should note that I do not so use it here.

(What Herrnstein and Murray had said, by the way, was "The rules that currently govern immigration provide the other major source of dysgenic pressure" [The Bell Curve, P 341])

You'll note that there's a hyperlink on "Would-be demagogues" above because I copied the section from the recently-released Kindle edition of Alien Nation, to which we added hyperlinks. That one goes to the U.K. Guardian's review of Alien Nation—a book that did not use the IQ argument, remember—entitled "The Far Right Leans Into The Bell Curve" (by Mark Taub, May 5, 1995).

Mark Taub is a good specimen of the "would-be demagogue." He described Brimelow as "one of the most fervent Bell Curve supporters,” which means he wrote a Forbes Magazine story about the controversy. (It was supposed to be a cover story but Steve Forbes had a last-minute hissy fit and insisted on burying it inside and excising all references to race. Come to think of it, Forbes is now a Heritage board member. Hmmm.)

But Taub was not as bad as Reason's Glenn Garvin [Email him], who wrote about Alien Nation

Self-preservation is colliding with a suicidal ideology within the American Right. The outcome of this battle will determine its future—and the future of the historic American nation.

Prior to last week, immigration patriots had growing reasons for optimism. Despite the best efforts of Grover Norquist and other corporate shills within Conservatism Inc., the American Right was slowly lining up against the Obama/ Schumer/ Rubio push for an Amnesty/ Immigration Surge. Even National Review featured a cover story written by CIS’s Mark Krikorian, which actually blamed Mitt Romney's defeat on the decline in white turnout. Drudge, after a period of silence, was prominently featuring anti-immigration stories. After Ann Coulter's declaration of war at CPAC 2013, other leading pundits, most critically Rush Limbaugh, joined the battle. Opposition to amnesty was becoming the default conservative position, with even the Weekly Standard joining the fight.

Maybe it’s simple partisanship. Unlike in 2006-2007, President Barack Hussein Obama is now leading the charge. After budget battles, gun control, Benghazi, the Boston terrorist attacks and the liberal MSM’s lust for white male villains and the IRS’ admitting it targeted Tea Party groups, Republicans were getting fed up.

But more importantly, a talking point that has made a real impact on the conservatives is the objective reality that “undocumented Americans” will never vote for Republicans—and that Amnesty ensures a blue Texas and a permanent Democratic majority.

Signs of discontent were coming from within the Congressional GOP. Pat Buchanan lookalike Ted Cruz proposed banning all illegals from ever obtaining American citizenship. Treason Lobby dallier Senator Rand Paul, as predicted, was showing signs of abandoning “reform” in order to protect his own Presidential ambitions. Even Marco Rubio, watching his lobbyist-promised path to the White House evaporating before

[Previously by Susie Green: Harmony before Insight? The Destruction of Western Man ]

There can be no better statement on the 2013 Amnesty/ Immigration Surge War than this:

The level of lying that has become common in the illegal alien debate is truly frightening and bespeaks an America that has passed some new threshold on the road to self-destruction.

One of these lies is intrinsic to the Senate bill and its variants: that these bills combine “enforcement” with amnesty. Given our current systematic failure to enforce the law and protect our borders, and given the president’s own palpable lack of interest in enforcing the law, and given the nonchalant or celebratory statements about illegal immigration by many of the president’s supporters, such as William Kristol and Michael Bloomberg, no intellectually honest person could believe that the enforcement side of the bill would be seriously acted upon.

Therefore the only way to establish the president’s and the government’s bona fides in this area is to pass an enforcement-only bill first and see if it is enforced. Otherwise we will inevitably end up with a vastly worse repetition of what happened in 1986, an amnesty of millions of illegal aliens, with no improvement in enforcement, leading to continued mass illegal immigration, followed by further calls for yet another amnesty.

Another big lie is the establishment’s denial that their various proposals are, in fact, amnesty proposals. Starting with the stinking head of our body politic…down to every liberal newspaper reporter, it is now simply taken for granted that a bill is only an amnesty bill if it involves giving the illegal alien instant citizenship. Anything short of that, such as giving him legal status in the United States with the option to pursue citizenship, is not, the establishment insists, amnesty.

Thus Jonathan Weisman writes in the Washington Post about a compromise bill that is now being floated:

The compromise could satisfy some conservatives opposed to any program that offers illegal immigrants a way to stay in the country and work toward citizenship, which they term “amnesty.”

See? A bill to allow illegal aliens to stay in the country legally and work toward citizenship is not amnesty. It is only falsely described as “amnesty”—by conservatives. See Weisman’s scare quotes. Thanks for straightening us out on that, Mr. Weisman.

In reality, amnesty means removing the penalty or the due consequence for a wrongful act. Under our law, the due consequence for a person who has illegally entered the United States is to be removed from the United States. Therefore to give illegal aliens legal residency in this country is amnesty, period.

All the bills that are on the table to give illegals some kind of legal status in the U.S., however that legal status is defined, are amnesty bills, period.”

[Hyperlinks added by VDARE.com]

Actually, wait a moment... that isn't about the Obama Administration's push for an Amnesty/ Immigration Surge at all! It’s about the second President Bush's efforts to push a nation-breaking legalization program in 2006, by my old friend, the late Lawrence M. Auster. [We must stop lying to ourselves or we will die, View From The Right, April 04, 2006 ]

It tells us something, both about Larry and about the 2013 Amnesty/ Immigration Surge Bill, that not a word needs to be changed—and once again, Larry’s View From the Right blog cuts to the core of the issue.

Immigration patriots have been here before. This isn't the first and may not be the last time Americans will have to face down a “stupid and evil” effort to push through amnesty. Luckily, we have a guide to waging the long war in the writings of the late and lamented Lawrence Auster, who never stopped

The firing of Jason Richwine by the Heritage Foundation is the most depressing thing that has happened in American politics for many years—and that’s a very hot competition.  Heritage was in an impregnable position:

The collapse of legitimacy in Washington continues, and the immigration debate is no exception. The rule of law withers away, while partisans wallow in sentimentalism, with curious consequences: consider the religious leaders who are at the forefront of the pro-amnesty movement. Somehow, they're on the same side of the issue as Big Business, the banksters, and the Wall Street Journal.

How did this come to pass?

A little history helps. In the past 40 years, evangelicals have made significant inroads into the once-Catholic populations of Mexico and Latin America. This was due in large part to the Catholic political detour into liberation theology that swept across the continent a generation ago. Protestant missionaries, often sponsored by small, independent congregations in the United States, had a simple message: "the Catholics preach politics, we preach the Bible." Tens of millions of Latino Catholics left the Church.

In the United States, the accusation rings true all too often. The Catholic Church has a strong political presence in Washington. According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) spent some $26.67 million on political advocacy in 2009; only AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, spent more ($87.90 million). Most recently, this activity focused on the bishops' battle against the HHS Contraceptive Mandate and homosexual "marriage." But over the long haul, those advocacy efforts have supported key elements of the Left's agenda: national health care, amnesty for illegal aliens, and expansion of the welfare state.

Several studies confirm that Catholics are leaving the pews—on both sides of the border. What happened in Latin America is also happening here: Timothy Cardinal Dolan, President of the USCCB, observes that some thirty million Americans today identify themselves as former Catholics. That is almost half the number of self-identified Catholics (some 60-70 million).

Post-Christian or Post-American?

We have entered a "post-Christian era," says Providence Bishop Thomas Tobin. The bishop was addressing the legalization of homosexual "marriage" in Rhode Island, but I wonder if his insight might also be playing a prominent role in the U.S. bishops' campaign for amnesty.

When it comes to immigration, America's bishops support an agenda so vast that its passage would quickly create some thirty million new Americans, once "family reunification" kicks in (with all of the reunions taking place stateside, of course).

I wonder, do the bishops want all those new Americans because they're so unhappy with the Americans they've already got?

Maybe so. Consider Los Angeles Archbishop José  Gomez. He's the point man in the USCCB's amnesty campaign. Born in Mexico, he loves his homeland and his people. Like his predecessor, Roger Cardinal Mahony, he has made amnesty his prime political cause. He has a parochial interest—the Los Angeles Times reports that ten percent of the residents of LA County are in the U.S. illegally—but his vision goes much further.

Archbishop Gomez avoids the terms "illegal" and "amnesty," advocating instead "comprehensive reform." More importantly, even when addressing legislative particulars, he speaks with authority, in the name of the Catholic Church. Occasionally he admits that Catholics can differ on the issue, but opponents of amnesty seldom hear an encouraging word from his pulpit.

Is the "Next America" the "New Mexico"?

According to Roy Beck of NumbersUSA, a nonpartisan research group, the average rate of immigration from the 1950s through the 1970s was three million a decade. Since 1990, the rate has been 11 million per decar]de. Of the immigration bill proposed by the "Gang of Eight" passes, 33 million new green cards will be issued in the next decade.

Such a large wave of new Americans raises serious questions regarding the challenge of assimilation, but Archbishop Gomez simply bypasses it—because he opposes it.

Three years ago, Archbishop Gomez described his vision of "The Next America" at a conference in the Napa Valley. For him, the "Next America" will be decidedly better than the current one. Echoing Bishop Tobin, he says that

"Our culture is changing…We have a legal structure that allows, and even pays for, the killing of babies in the womb. Our courts and legislatures are redefining the natural institutions of marriage and the family. We have an elite culture… that is openly hostile to religious faith."[Immigration and the “Next America”: Perspectives from Our History, August 10, 2011]

All too true. So what is to blame for this travesty? Pope Benedict XVI blamed

For generations, Massachusetts was ruled by a demographic that could proudly trace its heritage back to colonial times. Indeed, it was once a considerable challenge to get elected to higher office in Massachusetts if you were not considered a “Proper Bostonian.”

Perhaps the best example of a Proper Bostonian legislator: Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924). A staunch defender of American sovereignty, Lodge is best known for being the lead opponent of U.S. membership in the League of Nations. But people forget that Lodge was also a vocal critic of immigration policy, even when it was still exclusively European.

Senator Lodge believed that immigration policy should be tailored to benefit the historical American nation, not just the immigrants themselves. In those days, that was an opinion no one was afraid to express.

Incidentally, Lodge also strongly supported greater rights for blacks—but in those days goodwill toward minorities did not require subordinating oneself to them.

The Proper Bostonian’s views on immigration and race mirrored the late Samuel Huntington’s distinction between settlers and immigrants. We are not a “nation of immigrants”; rather, we are a nation of “settlers” (the Anglo-Protestants who founded the country) and “immigrants.” And those who immigrate into this established Anglo-Protestant society are obligated to assimilate into it. (I say this as a New England Catholic of substantially Irish descent.)

But things began to change around the turn of the century, when Boston’s James Michael Curley (1874-1958), the American-born son of Irish immigrants, began stoking resentment against America’s founding demographic. But Curley didn’t just incite resentment among the Irish—he also successfully instilled guilt in the Yankee Protestants. And that’s where the real damage was done.

Seemingly overnight, being a Proper Bostonian became a moral weakness while membership in the “oppressed” immigrant class became a moral strength—a bandwagon the plutocratic Kennedys rode all the way to White House.

In due course, Henry Cabot Lodge’s grandson, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., was defeated in 1952 by then Rep. John F. Kennedy. And Lodge’s great grandson, George Cabot Lodge, was defeated by Ted Kennedy ten years later. As Cardinal William O’Connell triumphantly put it: “The Puritan has passed. The Catholic remains.”

Future historians will certainly be dumbfounded

[See also Burn The Witch!” Heritage Foundation Scuttles Away From Jason Richwine—And The Cold Hard Facts, By John Derbyshire]

How low will supporters of the Gang of Eight immigration bill go to get their way? This low: They've shamelessly branded an accomplished Ivy League-trained quantitative analyst a "racist" and will stop at nothing to destroy his career as they pave their legislative path to another massive illegal alien benefits bonanza.

Jason Richwine works for the conservative Heritage Foundation. He's a Harvard University Ph.D. who co-authored a study that pegs the cost of the Ted Kennedy Memorial Open Borders Act 2.0 legislation at $6.3 trillion. Lead author Robert Rector is a senior research fellow at Heritage, a former United States Office of Personnel Management analyst and the intellectual godfather of welfare reform. He holds a master's degree in political science from Johns Hopkins University.

Both Democrats and Republicans leaped to discredit the 102-page report without bothering to read it. The Washington Post falsely claimed the study did not take into account increased revenues from amnestied illegal alien workers. It did. Haley Barbour immediately proclaimed that the Heritage assessment of government costs incurred by amnestied illegal aliens was "not serious."

They want to talk gravitas? Let's talk gravitas. Blowhard Barbour is a career politician and paid lobbyist for the government of Mexico who has carried water for open borders since the Bush years. Richwine received his doctorate in public policy in 2009 from Harvard University's prestigious Kennedy School of Government. He holds bachelor's degrees in mathematics and political science from American University. Before joining Heritage in 2010, he worked at the American Enterprise Institute on a dissertation fellowship.

Richwine's 166-page dissertation, "IQ and Immigration Policy," is now being used to smear him—and, by extension, all of Heritage's scholarship—as "racist." While the punditocracy and political establishment sanctimoniously call for "honest discussions" on race, they rush to crush bona fide, dispassionate academic inquiries into the controversial subjects of intelligence, racial and ethnic differences, and domestic policy.

Richwine's entire thesis is now online here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/140239668/IQ-and-Immigration-Policy-Jason-Richwine. Part One reviews the science of IQ. Part Two delves into empirical research comparing IQs of the native-born American population with that of immigrant groups, with the Hispanic population broken out. Richwine explores the causes of an immigrant IQ deficit that appears to persist among Hispanic immigrants to the U.S. through several generations.

The thesis analyzes social policy consequences of these findings and uses a model of the labor market "to show how immigrant IQ affects the economic surplus accruing to natives and the wage impact on low-skill natives."

The smug dismissal of Richwine's credentials and scholarship is to be expected by liberal hacks and clown operatives. But a reckless and cowardly pileup of knee-jerk dilettantes on the right—including former McCain campaign co-chair Ana Navarro and conservative Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin—have joined the character assassins of the Soros-sphere, MSNBC and Mother Jones in deeming Richwine a "racist." The drooling attack dogs of the far-left blog Daily Kos have now launched a pressure campaign against the JFK School demanding to know "why the school awarded Richwine a Ph.D. and what they plan to do in the future to prevent it from happening again."

No researcher or academic institution is safe

Harvard financial historian Niall Ferguson has gotten himself into the usual sort of Larry Summers / James D. Watson-style trouble for answering a question about economist John Maynard Keynes’s famous quip—“In the long run, we are all dead”—by cheekily pointing out that Keynes was a childless homosexual. There’s no transcript of his original remarks, but a writer who heard him speak wrote it up on his magazine’s website. [Harvard Professor Trashes Keynes For Homosexuality, By Tom Kostigen, fa-mag.com, May 3, 2013.]

Ferguson commented: “In the long run our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are alive, and will have to deal with the consequences of our economic actions.”

Ferguson has groveled, needless to say, but the Homintern is still pursuing him—see Niall Ferguson: Keynes Was Gay for Germany, by Jonathan Chait, nymag.com, May 7, 2013.

(In contrast to Keynes, the philoprogenitive Ferguson has three children by his first wife and one by his latest, the courageous anti-Islamist activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali.)

Ferguson’s off-the-cuff comments generated a vast global spasm of gasping and tsk-tsking. A Google search of “niall ferguson keynes gay” comes up with over two million  hits.

Why the hysteria?

Because intellectual life has declined to the point where all that matters is Are You on the Side of the Good Guys or the Bad Guys? And the Good Guys are powerful groups of self-proclaimed victims.

Ferguson’s suggestion that family life can influence ideology is, of course, true. For example, Mitt Romney carried only 16 percent of the gay vote in 2012 in contrast to 57 percent of the married vote. Over the last four elections, the rate in each state at which whites are married has been the strongest determinant of the Electoral Vote.

But Ferguson felt it necessary to issue “An Unqualified Apology” [May 4, 2013]because he makes a lot of money giving speeches to financial organizations, so he can’t afford to offend Designated Victim Groups that play a major role within them—such as gays, Jews, and women. At this moment in our culture, gays are particularly dominant, and thus are looking for ways to throw their weight around to intimidate skeptics for good.

What’s more striking, though, are the Voluntary Auxiliary Thought Police who rush in to denounce heretics. As Dennis Dale commented during another recent brouhaha of ridiculous moral outrage:

The Left has routed us and is now chasing us into the weeds to cut us down individually--because they haven't even the capacity to imagine doing anything else.

What are they going to do, declare victory and behave graciously? Where's the fun—or more importantly the influence and cash—in that? They are like a vast standing army with nothing to do and no wish to return to civilian life.

Still, Ferguson was somewhat unfair. Keynes (1883-1946) betrayed today’s conventional wisdom by doing the supposedly impossible: he converted, permanently, from a homosexual lifestyle to a heterosexual lifestyle when—to the shock and dismay of his former Bloomsbury boyfriends—he married the popular ballerina Lydia Lopokova in 1925.

He wasn’t under any particular social or career pressure at the time. He just switched his affections.

Moreover, we can see that Keynes was concerned about the welfare of future generations of the British from his lifelong advocacy of….(wait for it) eugenics!

After all, in 1911 Keynes, along with the great statistician and geneticist