This is a dissertation for a Harvard Public Policy Ph.D. from 2009...

If you thought "national IQ" was a dumb concept, how about taking that up a notch and making policy based on "regional IQ"?

Here Richwise discovers that children of poor, low-education migrants who face daily discrimination from the kind of people who attribute socioeconomic differences to innate intelligence don't fare well on a test whose outcome is strongly correlated with socioeconomic status.

At no point in a dissertation supervised by economists does Richwise actually control for education, socioeconomic status, parental education, or any other factor that has a bigger impact on economic success than a deeply flawed intelligence test. In a 2009 Harvard dissertation.

As best as I could tell, this is the only regression in the entire dissertation. Written in 2009. No details provided about any of the independent variables. The controls are barely mentioned. No mention of dealing with a scale dependent variable. No research design at all.

The entire premise of one of the chapters is there is no self-selection when it comes to who immigrates to the US (and who stays).

FYI, the author used this Harvard Ph.D. as a springboard toward a career of promoting anti-immigration policies, policies he's still peddling today. Good job Harvard.

Just noticed the "more underclass behavior" (a less racist way of saying crime) quote in the abstract. The claim is easy to verify. In fact, undocumented and documented immigrants commit proportionally fewer crimes than native-born Americans. https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/12/01/2014704117