Fragments of controversy

They’re suggesting that if we create a process for selecting people we like, and apply standards to the selection process — that we will get a better class of people from that process than we will if we simply chose them at random. Wow.

Hey Adrian – I am sure you can point us to evidence on the “low genetic intelligence” you attribute to the descendants of Hispanic immigrants… can you?

Who knows what the genetic component is or is not in this, but here’s the best meta-analysis of Hispanic IQ in America:

A 2001 meta-analysis of 39 studies covering a total 5,696,519 individuals in America (aged 14 and above) came up with an overall difference of 0.72 standard deviations in g (the “general factor” in cognitive ability) between “Anglo” whites and Hispanics. The 95% confidence range of the studies ran from .60 to .88 standard deviations, so there’s not a huge amount of disagreement among the studies.

One standard deviation equals 15 IQ points, so that’s a gap of 10.8 IQ points, or an IQ of 89 on the Lynn-Vanhanen scale where white Americans equal 100. That would imply the average Hispanic would fall at the 24th percentile of the white IQ distribution. This inequality gets worse at higher IQs Assuming a normal distribution, 4.8% of whites would fall above 125 IQ versus only 0.9% of Hispanics, which explains why Hispanics are given ethnic preferences in prestige college admissions.

In contrast, 105 studies of 6,246,729 individuals found an overall white-black gap of 1.10 standard deviations, or 16.5 points. (I typically round this down to 1.0 standard deviation and 15 points). So, the white-Hispanic gap appears to be about 65% as large as the notoriously depressing white-black gap. (Warning: this 65% number does not come from a perfect apples to apples comparison because more studies are used in calculating the white-black difference than the white-Hispanic difference.)

Source: Roth, P. L., Bevier, C. A., Bobko, P., Switzer III, F. S. & Tyler, P. (2001) ” Ethnic group differences in cognitive ability in employment and educational settings: a meta-analysis.” Personnel Psychology 54, 297–330.

This fits well with lots of other data. For example, Hispanics generally do almost as badly on the National Assessment of Educational Progress school achievement tests as blacks, but that average is dragged down by immigrant kids who have problems adjusting to English. The last time the NAEP asked about where the child was born was 1992, and Dr. Stefan Thernstrom of Harvard kindly provided me with the data from that examination. For foreign-born Hispanics, the typical gap versus non-Hispanic whites was 1.14 times as large as the black-white gap. But for American-born Hispanics, the gap between non-Hispanic whites and American-born Hispanics was 0.67 times as large as the gap between non-Hispanic whites and blacks, very similar to the 0.65 difference seen in the meta-analysis of IQs.

Rustbelt,

As a whole, illegal immigrants are likely paying more payroll taxes than is required by law. Taxes are being withheld from the paychecks of at least 60% of all illegal immigrants. Few are collecting the earned income credits to which such low income workers are entitled.

All such workers who use a phony SSN are contributing to the social security and medicare funds. As undocumented workers, they will never be able to collect benefits.

The victim in the crime – the crime of using phony SSN’s – is actually the perpetrator of the crime himself.

The problem is that you’ve already stacked the deck against the children of illegal immigrants. Because they are illegal, their parents are:

- unlikely to own residences, a factor consistent with social stability;

- likely to demonstrate disrespect for the law and authority which seeks to take away their means of survival;

- unlikely to move into more rewarding occupations, from which to provide a better living standard for their children.

IMO, using results of illegal immigrant families to predict success of potential legal families is just not valid.