Fox News hosted anti-immigrant, discredited academic Jason Richwine -- who once claimed Latinos may “never reach IQ parity” with whites -- to peddle shoddy research painting immigrants as a fiscal burden. Richwine used the Fox platform to hype his anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) report, which experts have called “fundamentally flawed" and pushes spurious claims about immigrants and welfare.
Fox & Friends hosts allowed Richwine to hype his May 9 CIS report that claimed immigrant-headed households receive more welfare than households headed by native-born people. Experts called the findings “fundamentally flawed” and misleading, but Fox host Tucker Carlson called them “almost unbelievable” and “shocking.”
TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): These numbers are almost unbelievable. I'm assuming they're true, they're shocking. I want to put up on the screen the amount in welfare that the average illegal immigrant gets every year. $5,692 versus American families $4,431. What kind of country gives more benefits to illegal aliens than to its own citizens?
JASON RICHWINE: Well, you know, Tucker, it's actually, it's all immigrant households, not just illegal. It's legal and illegal. They both receive a very large amount of welfare. In fact, actually, about half of all immigrant households receive some form of welfare. And you see the numbers on the screen there. So it's quite large. To me, the biggest takeaway from this is that there is something fundamentally wrong with your immigration system when immigrants are receiving more welfare than natives.
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CARLSON: Or at least have a public debate about it, which as of right now is not allowed at all, as you know. So the basic justification for the record high immigration levels we have now, 3 million people in the last two years, is that our economy needs it. They're the engine of the economy. It's a net plus to America economically. But these numbers suggest the opposite.
RICHWINE: Immigration certainly raises GDP, but almost all of that money goes to the immigrants themselves. There's really only a small sliver that ends up going to natives and, in exchange for that sliver, there's a very large redistribution of money from labor to capital.
Jason Richwine wrote in 2009 that Hispanics and blacks have lower IQs than white people, has penned articles for a “nationalist” website, and has tied himself to a network of anti-immigrant nativists. Richwine resigned from conservative think tank Heritage Foundation after co-authoring a shoddy, heavily criticized anti-immigration report.
CIS has ties to hate groups in the nativist lobby, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, and has been repeatedly criticized for its shoddy research.