Ever heard the classic breakup line, “It’s not you, it’s me”?

That, in a nutshell, is the thesis of the book The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal by Mark Krikorian, who heads the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates sharply reducing immigration. Krikorian argues that, while the immigrants coming here now are similar to those that arrived a century ago, the United States has undergone profound changes that make it much less able to absorb newcomers.

But at a recent discussion of Krikorian’s book that aired on C-SPAN, a young academic offered a different twist on Krikorian’s argument — one that’s far more appealing to white nationalists. Jason Richwine, a doctoral student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, essentially asserted, “It’s partly me, but there’s no question it’s you, too.”

Or, as he actually said: “The argument that immigrants themselves are no different from the ones that came 100 years ago I think is quite wrong, and I think that the major difference here is ethnicity — or race, if you will.” Not only do people of the same race tend to stick together, Richwine said, but “races differ in all sorts of ways, and probably the most important way is in IQ.”

Not surprisingly, Richwine’s remarks were warmly received on white nationalist blogs. “Definitely someone we want to keep our eye on,” wrote Marcus Epstein on the blog of the anti-immigration hate site VDARE.com.

“[His] name sounds Jewish, which makes what follows even more remarkable,” crowed Larry Auster, who runs the blog View from the Right.

Richwine joined Krikorian and Fred Siegal, a professor at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, for the July 1 discussion at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an influential, conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. Richwine, who is completing a dissertation on immigration and IQ, is a National Research Initiative fellow at AEI and will remain there after finishing his degree this fall. He joins AEI-sponsored scholar Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, the highly controversial 1994 book that argues that blacks and Latinos have lower IQs than whites and that most social welfare and affirmative action programs are doomed to failure as a result. ( continue to full post… )