Heritage Foundation Immigration Study Co-Author Resigns, Accused of "Sloppy Methodology" and Linked to Racist Sentiments

Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint
(photo: The Washington Post)

The right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation had a plan to hijack the political dialogue over America's most recent, painful iteration of immigration policy. A study was commissioned that essentially was intended to provide a blueprint for restrictive legislation on those without passports, but had a desire to usefully live in the United States. The "experts" who conducted the study would have provided intellectual cover for the foundation's overt political agenda. Adding heat to the Heritage fire was its recent appointment of Tea Party advocate and former US senator Jim DeMint as the think tank's capo.

Jason Richwine
(photo: slate.com)

The report became a disaster for the right-wing. Its co-author, Harvard-trained Jason Richwine, used specious methodology to reach his conclusions. Among them, according to a report in The Washington Post, was the assertion that "the cost of legalizing 11 million undocumented immigrants" would cost the nation over six trillion dollars.

Well, a trillion here or there has never stopped a conservative politician from advancing pointless weapons programs while proposing a tax cut for one percenters. What made the Heritage broadside dead on DC arrival was Richwine's 2009 Harvard doctoral thesis. In it, the Post story noted, the aspiring scholar claimed "there are deep-seated and likely genetic IQ differences between the races and that low-IQ immigrants should be kept out of the country." The Ivy-trained Richwine, according to a Talking Points Memo piece, once contributed an article on Hispanic incarceration rates for a white nationalist website. Oops.

US Senator Marco Rubio.
He recently denounced the
Heritage-Richwine study 

For the conservative establishment, still licking its wounds from its disastrous showing with "ethnic" groups during the 2012 presidential election, Richwine's background put the right-wing under a most unwelcome spotlight. The feeling that significant, vocal elements within the Tea Party and the GOP's more extreme right would openly advocate seemingly racist positions continues to linger after Barack Obama's re-election to the presidency. Many in the GOP, including two Hispanic US Senators from important electoral states, are very uncomfortable with the parties' racist drift. Less extreme conservatives and their allies, such as Jeb Bush, are powerful enough to do something about it. Let's just say the Bush faction got the word out.

Richwine resigned from the Heritage Foundation this past week, according to many sources, including The Atlantic Wire.

Silicon Valley's Startup Culture Vs. Employment Law

Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial spirit embraces a free-wheeling startup culture. Few rules animate these typically small firms, whose key employees essentially disdain boundaries and imagine social laws apply only to others. This atmosphere and belief system occasionally creates legal and moral issues for the enterprise founders, principal investors, management, and yes, the "staff."

Keith Rabois
(photo: NY Daily News)

A case in point is the recent resignation of Square's Chief Operating Officer Keith Rabois. According to a Reuters story picked up by siliconvaley.com, the COO said auf weidersehen due to a legal contretemps involving an employee with whom Rabois had canoodled for two years. The story suggested that startups and their key assets could essentially do, say, or suggest anything to anybody on the staff at any time. It was as open and as vulgar as a frat house on a drinking binge, or as dangerous as a physical game of "truth or dare."

The story didn't really pinpoint Silicon Valley's all-male executive suites as a cause of these behaviors. Yet, it's hardly a secret that the tech world is the boy's club, filled with young guns who've made money too easily and too quickly. They sometimes come from environments where privilege quickly translates into repellent actions taken without consideration for their consequences. The movie The Social Network, spotlighting the actions of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, shows Harvard's arrogant, implicit encouragement of entitlement. In that respect, Silicon Valley companies aren't greatly different than that Athens on the Charles.

What's most off-putting is the current American idealization of Silicon Valley's lack of ethos, I suppose.  "Creativity," "innovation," and "progress" apparently make objectionable behavior by very intelligent, ambitious under-25-year-old men acceptable. Behind this sleazy facade is not sexual drive as much as a drive for power and status. These young 'uns, intoxicated with their uninhibited use of control, become behavioral monsters or tricksters, such as the Sean Parker character Justin Timberlake so convincingly portrayed in The Social Network.

The Reuters piece mentions other activities, such as whitewater rafting, that had to be curtailed once a startup approached a significant financial scale and staff size. There was a sense of melancholy as small enterprise owners realized those "exciting" team-building activities were fraught with legal peril. The owners also realize employees might prefer getting paid via a lawsuit than through a problematic IPO. That is also the time when Silicon Valley's libertarian zillionaires discover they live in a land of laws, and not in a self-created nation of one-man rule.

Harvard and "The Social Network"

The initial critical focus about The Social Network involved the film's portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg. The unflattering portrait of Facebook's supreme being, masterfully performed by Jesse Eisenberg, certainly merited the attention.

However, The Social Network's script allowed for sentiment, even compassion, to elbow its way into the picture. No such quarter was given to Harvard University. The school is depicted as an extraordinarily unpleasant arena, in which ego, ambition, wealth, and social status collide rather than mesh. No Harvard student, faculty member, administrator, or alum comes across as even remotely decent. The caustic sketch of former Harvard president (and Obama advisor) Lawrence Summers is especially damning. The school's unsparing atmosphere is positively unnerving. Why would a parent encourage their daughter or son to immerse her or himself in such a troubled institution?

This portrait of America's "best and brightest" is very disturbing, far more so than Zuckerberg callously promoting his algorithmically-based nightmare. Harvard's role in incubating its talent and shaping its pupils in its code of behavior appears malignant rather than salubrious. If this is the best our country can do, then heaven help us all.

The image is a still from plume, a 2006 work by Tessa Johung. The work appeared in Frame by Frame: Animation at Harvard, a show held at the Carpenter Center for the Arts at Harvard University.

NYC Round Ball Recollections

I played soccer when I was a pre-teen. My family had just moved to New York City (Queens, to be exact) from upstate New York. No one in my family had ever touched a soccer ball or watched a soccer match. (They did watch Jim Brown play lacrosse at Syracuse University.)

My first friends in Queens were from South America. They knew soccer and introduced me to the game. We played in a small grassy area behind one of the apartment towers where we lived. These were impromptu games, "unorganized activities" in bureaucratic jargon, and they were certainly not as serious as the basketball games in the public school playground a block away from our soccer patch. I didn't think any of us had any talent for the sport, but Harvard offered one of my South American friends a soccer scholarship.

The basketball players were obviously talented, and came from all over the city to play on Sunday mornings. They played hard and without mercy. At least two players who eventually made NBA teams were among the playground athletes I saw my first autumn in New York. Harvard never approached any of them; Tobacco Road schools were more like it.

I stopped playing ball in high school, opting instead to throw shot put. That sport and I were definitely mismatched. One day I ceased throwing a lead ball into the dirt, and took up golf. I played with a cross-eyed guy who could drive a ball straight down the fairway, something I rarely did.

After a summer assault on New York City's various public courses, I concluded that round ball sports were not for me, at least as a participant. That left water sports and ice skating. I stunk at both of them. My last stand was whiffle ball. I was pretty good at that, but that fling lasted a summer in Wisconsin. After that, I returned to New York, and I never attempted to play a round ball sport in the city.

PS. The photo shows the apartment complex where I lived in Forest Hills during my pre-teen and teen years. The grassy area was behind the building on the right; the city playground was also in that direction.