Outraged Harvard students have delivered a petition with over 1,200 signatures to the university's president demanding an investigation into how a doctoral thesis, arguing that Latino immigrants had lower IQ's than non-Latino whites, came to be approved in the first place.

The petition also calls on banning future racial superiority research at Harvard University.

The thesis, "IQ and Immigration Policy" was written in 2009 by former Heritage Foundation policy analyst Jason Richwine, who last week resigned to his post amid disclosures of the controversial dissertation.

In the paper he also recommends the U.S. adopt an immigration policy based on IQ, a score derived from a standardized test designed to assess intelligence.

Richwine went on to say only immigrants with the highest IQs should be let in and that Hispanics, their children and grandchildren were destined to lesser intellect.  

Richwine's dissertation said, “Today’s immigrants are not as intelligent on average as white natives. The IQ difference between the two groups is large enough to have substantial negative effects on the economy and on American society." 

"The upside is that calling attention to this problem may help focus policy on attracting a different kind of immigrant - the poor with great potential," he wrote.

Richwine is unapologetic for his comments, and that has only served to fuel the Harvard student body, which delivered a petition last week to president Drew Faust and David Ellwood, the dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

“One of the many mischaracterizations of my dissertation is that I support an ethnicity-based immigration policy,” he said to the Boston Globe on Friday. “I do not. I endorse treating everyone as individuals. That’s clear throughout the text.”

The new petition was coupled with a letter condemning Richwine's research as "racist claims" that are "unfit for Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard University as a whole." 

The letter was signed by over 23 student groups including the HKS Latino Caucas, Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy, HKS Latin American Caucus, the Black Student Union at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Women's Policy journal.

"We believe in academic freedom as it is crucial to the functioning of a university," the letter said. "However, we also believe that putting forth claims of racial superiority based on inherent genetic advantage to be on par with those who have used pseudo-science throughout history to justify state-based hate."

Richwine said the move by the Harvard student body could set a dangerous precedent. 

“This is a really worrisome idea here, that the students want to dictate what scholarship will be allowed at Harvard University,” an unemployed Richwine told The Boston Globe on Friday.

Ellwood, the Kennedy School dean, urged scholars and critics to review Richwine's work carefully before engaging in a reasoned discussion about it.

"All PhD dissertations are reviewed by a committee of scholars," Ellwood said in a statement. “In this case, the committee consisted of three highly respected and discerning faculty members who come from diverse intellectual traditions.”

Richwine's work was backed by George Borjas, the chairman of the Kennedy School's Standing Committee on Public Policy, which accepted Richwine's research and called it "sound" in an interview with The Citizen.

Last week was supposed to be a positive one for Richwine, at least from his view and that of the Heritage Foundation, which had just released a report by the analyst and Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the organization, that said the price tag of comprehensive immigration reform would be roughly $6.3 trillion. 

The think tank released the report as hearings were beginning in the Senate on a bipartisan bill and some 300 amendments regarding an overhaul of the country’s immigration system.

One of the most objectionable parts of the bill for conservatives calls for allowing millions of undocumented immigrants to be able to obtain legal status, first on a provisional basis, and eventually permanently.

"The Harvard paper is not a work product of the Heritage Foundation," according to a statement on the foundation’s blog. “Its findings do not reflect the positions of the Heritage Foundation or the conclusions of our study on the cost of amnesty to U.S. taxpayers, as race and ethnicity are not part of Heritage immigration policy recommendations.”

FOXNEWS.COM
Read more: http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2013/05/20/harvard-students-demand-investigation-into-thesis-about-latino-immigrants-iq/#ixzz2Tw6OwLjj

It all started about two years ago with a textbook racist joke.

"Why would you want a Mexican car? 'Cuz cars reflect national characteristics, don't they?" joked Richard Hammond, one of the hosts of BBC's Top Gear. "Mexican cars are just going to be lazy, feckless, flatulent, overweight ogre, leaning against a fence asleep looking at a cactus with a blanket with a hole in the middle on as a coat."

Julio Ricardo Varela, a then 41-year-old Puerto Rican blogger who had recently left his publishing job at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, came across the video online and like many who watched it, wasn't amused. When BBC took it down from YouTube, Varela found a copy and uploaded it to his own player on his personal blog JulioRVarela.com.

Thousands who wanted to find the video came to Varela's site, where he accused BBC of trying to cover up the whole controversy, labeling the video "lame and racist." His blog was inundated with traffic.

And so the idea for Latino Rebels, one of the most talked about Latino-centric sites, was born.

One night soon after the Top Gear video incident, Varela saw an episode of The Daily Show which left him determined to create a site to fill in as the "Latino Daily Show." The next day, Varela, who once frequented Boston's improv comedy circuit, purchased the domain name LatinoRebels.com and out of pure coincidence, on Cinco de Mayo of 2011, the site went live.

At the time, Varela wrote that one of his primary objectives was to "expose those so-called patriots who are quick to use ignorance and hate to spread lies about Latinos living in the United States."

Latino Rebels took a red star with five points, a symbol sometimes associated with communism, as its icon. But Varela insists that the choice had nothing to do with a political ideology and that he picked it from a crowd-sourced design effort simply because it "felt cool and edgy."

On the political spectrum, Varela thinks of himself as moderate.

"We don't all drink the Obama KoolAid. I'm kind of middle-of-the-roader, which is funny, because everyone thinks I'm a leftist," he said. "I've learned to kind of ignore that."

His friend and fellow "Rebelde" Charlie Garcia pokes fun at Varela for being "the intellectual offspring of a liberal northeastern Harvard education and all baggage that brings with it."

"I'm resolved to make him feel uncomfortable in his little intellectual cocoon, indeed to break him out of it," said Garcia, a marketer and businessman who says he brings to the Rebels a political ideology "formed at the U.S. Air Force Academy in the mid-West" and "in the jungles of Central America teaching counter guerilla warfare to militaries trying to shake off communist insurgencies in the 1980s."

Garcia recently joined the Rebels, a group of about 30 bloggers that includes many of Varela's close friends. Despite their political differences in other respects, the Rebels say they are intent on "kill[ing] stereotypes with humor, insight, [and] compassion" and empowering the Latino community. Other Rebels include Efrain Nieves, Tony Vargas, Bella Vida Letty, Charlie Vázquez, Tony Diaz, Odilia Rivera Santos and Rodrigo Sanchez-Chavarria.

Varela said he was determined from the beginning to make the site not just about himself, so he publishes the posts of most bloggers under the name "REBELDES," although sometimes he himself contributes with the name "JULITO." (His father is also named Julio, making him Julito to friends and family.)

Latino Rebels' primary focus is not "hard journalism," according to Varela. Instead, the blog brings attention and commentary to controversies that affect the Latino community, calling "No Mames" (Mexican slang which loosely translates from Spanish to "Stop messing around") when politicians or corporations step out of line.

"We're kind of the 'Hey, look we found this' kind of place," said Varela, who is now 43.

Varela is also intent on engaging his online community through constant back-and-forths on Facebook, Twitter, and in comment sections. His persistence has resulted in the most active commenting community in the Latino media space. Nearly three-fourths of his traffic came from Facebook last year.

However, Latino Rebels is still fairly small, and its WordPress design still somewhat rustic. Since its inception two years ago, the site has gotten nearly a million unique visitors and has built a very engaged online community largely comprised of bilingual, bicultural young Latinos, according to Varela. For comparison, The Huffington Post, one of the most trafficked news sites on the web, boasts 250 million uniques a month, but much of their traffic stems from Google searches over community engagement.

Still, Latino Rebels in many ways shapes conversations about Latinos in bigger outlets by being the first, the fastest, and the most opinionated. Where many "legacy" news sources refrain from offering harsh critiques of the media and corporate America, Latino Rebels dives in head first, often with the loudest and harshest indictments.

Some of their first big stories include a post calling out the Coors "Emboricuate" campaign as being degrading to Puerto Ricans, a video of Puerto Ricans burning an American flag during President Obama's visit to the island, and a Facebook meme featuring a farmer named Jesus.

It's hard to exist in the Latino media space without taking notice of Varela and his site on a daily basis. He's a disruptor, and an agitator, and it's clear he loves what he does. I've long wondered, how many Rebels are there really? Why no by-lines? Does every Rebelde agree with every post? (The answer to the last question is no, not always.)

Varela and I have been engaging on Twitter and Facebook since earlier this year, but after I watched his site play an integral role inbringing down La Comay, a homophobic puppet on Puerto Rican TV, I knew I wanted to know more about the head rebelde in charge.

Julio, The Fighter

Moving from San Juan to the Bronx at the age of 7, Varela said he had to learn early to defend himself. When he moved to the Bronx to live with his mother due to his parents' divorce, he was picked on for being named Julio and called a "spic" at age 10 by one of his classmates at school.

"I fought, I had to defend myself, it was nasty," he said of his middle school brawls. Later in life, Varela had to defend himself against the charge of not being "Latino enough," because his mother is Italian American. He says it's taken him into adulthood to fully resolve his complex ethnic identity.

"I've heard it all, I've heard it all, it's like 'Oh you're American, you're from the Bronx, you grew up there, your dad is from Puerto Rico," he said. "It's just like 'I was born in Puerto Rico, mancha de platano, get over it, I'm a hundred percent boricua, get over it," he said, invoking the island's slang to his imaginary aggressor.

Even when Varela got to Harvard, where he graduated cum laude with a degree in History and Literature of Latin America, he didn't stop fighting. Varela took out loans and worked for six years in his publishing job to pay off his Harvard education, in addition to a year scrubbing dorm toilets. It wasn't until his grandmother left him money in her will that he was able to pay off his debts. He's incredibly proud to have worked his way through Harvard, listing his alma mater as his first descriptor on his Twitter bio.

"On graduation day, they just handed me an envelope with a piece of cardboard in it," he said. When he returned seven years later with the last payment for his education, they finally awarded him a diploma. "They blew the dust off of it and handed it to me. It was a great feeling."

Varela is also the descendant of fighters, he says, including Congressman Mario Biaggi, a New York City cop and U.S. Congressman who was an outspoken representative for the Bronx from 1969 to 1988, but ultimately ended up serving 2.5 years in prison over corruption charges.

Varela's passion -- which he claims as his greatest strength and greatest weakness -- has been channeled more productively through Latino Rebels, he says.

"Opinions in certain situations can either harm you or help you. I'm somebody who says the emperor has no clothes a lot -- and sometimes people don't want to hear that," said Varela, who became a paid contributor at NBC Latino last year, after Latino Rebels took off in its first year.

"Love Us, Hate Us, You Can't Ignore Us"

As with many opinion-makers, not everyone agrees with Julio. Latino Rebels has some outspoken critics, probably the most vocal of which is Think Mexican, a Tumblr blog which aggregates news and culture relevant to Mexicans in the U.S. The blog has repeatedly accused Varela of trying to capitalize on the plight of Mexicans and or of working for big brands, including Fox News Latino.

"For those not aware, @latinorebels is the work of a Puerto Rican marketer using the image of Emiliano Zapata to appeal to Mexicans. Scam!," the site tweeted back in November of 2011.

Varela defended his site from their attacks in this post, and ended up blocking the Think Mexican account, and sending its leader a letter from his lawyer.

"How do we make money? From our clients," he wrote. "We make no money from our followers, nor do we ask them for money. Clients hire us to run their social media accounts and to get to the key under 25 demographic of Latinos in the US and Latin America."

Although Varela is guarded about which brands he currently represents (he says he can't name some of them under contract), he claims that at least one is a Fortune 500 Company and none of them are Fox News Latino. Varela formerly consulted Univision on Spanish-language social media strategy.

His consulting work allows him to help his wife pay the bills for their middle-school aged children who they live with in Milton, a suburb of Boston. His work also allows him to offer about $50 in compensation to some of his bloggers for four posts. The Latino Rebels site doesn't sell ads yet, and so doesn't make money from their content.

But, Varela says that what some like "Think Mexican" don't understand is that for as diverse as Latinos are "we have more similarities than we do differences." It's important we stick together, he says.

And for as much as his critics dislike him, his supporters adore him.

Latino Rebels has over 13,000 Twitter followers and 33,000 Facebook subscribers.

Charles Garcia, the Latino Rebels contributor and co-founder of the "Latino Rebels Foundation" as well as "Latino Rebels Radio" with Varela, says that "Julito" is "fearless," an hard worker who often pulls "all-nighters," a "deep-thinker," and a "giver" who "has never been driven by money."

The new Latino Rebels Foundation aims to fight discrimination against Latinos in the media and politics and provide scholarships to young Latino journalists and filmmakers. Its board members include journalists like Rick Sanchez, Pilar Marrero, Adrian Carrasquillo, and Fernando Espuelas, among others.

"You have to understand that Latino Rebels is not a money making venture – it's a money and a time suck, a bottomless pit," said Garcia. "So Julio spends a lot of time doing secondary ventures in order to keep food on the table, while Latino Rebels is this other part of his life, like an all-consuming hobby he's deeply passionate about."

But even some who say Varela's heart is in the right place, don't always agree with his outspoken opinions. Laura Martinez, a blogger who covers Latino media will also sit on the board of the the new foundation, says sometimes Varela is just too sensitive.

"[Latino Rebels is] giving Latinos a voice they haven't had before, but I don't agree with them all the time," she said. "And that's okay."

Martinez thinks Varela was misguided when he went on Colombian radio to argue that Sofia Vergara was damaging the image of Latinas in the U.S. Similarly, Martinez disagreed with Julio when he went after The Daily Show (the initial inspiration for his Rebels site) for a skit on Cinco de Mayo. Julito called it "condescending" and said "it didn't work." Martinez thought it did.

"The bit was not only funny, but why can't we be doing that?" Martinez asked. "Why can't Latino media be making fun of this kind of stuff, parodying American's ideas of Cinco de Mayo and all that. I thought it was brilliant."

But Varela welcomes the criticism. "Love us or hate us, you can't ignore us," he said of his critics. Not everything has to be a hit, he says.

"We take risks, 9 times out of 10, or 99 out of 100, its the right risk," he said. "We'll miss one or two, but you know what, so does the AP."

One of those risks might even be a change in direction, redirecting the focus of the site away from just Latinos and to a broader general market.

"I think the problem right now is that I'm also interested in stories that are not 'Latino,' but the problem is by creating a niche for Latinos, you get noticed," Varela said.

"I'd rather stop talking about immigration and media perception of Latinos, because it means if we can stop talking about it, that means we've done our job. Eventually, in five years, if I change the name of LatinoRebels.com to Rebels.com that means we've succeeded.""

But some think the Latino community needs him too much.

"I think it's a bad idea for him to move to the mainstream," said Laura Martinez. "We don't have a Latino Al Sharpton, we need a Latino Al Sharpton. He's the closest thing we have to it."

It's doubtful that Varela would ever stop defending "Latino" causes in this lifetime. He says his new Latino Rebels Foundation will be his next step to inspire future generations of Latino leaders.

"I'm done just complaining. I want to do something about this," he said.

ABCNEWS.GO.COM

http://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/News/meet-julio-ricardo-varela-blogger-latino-rebels/story?id=19216198#.UZt-eYLQ0p4

A new report finds that passing an immigration reform bill that would allow undocumented immigrants living in the United States to apply for a legal status would result in large benefits for the U.S. economy—with states reaping the biggest economic gains.

The report released Friday by the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning Washington think tank, comes on the heels of the Heritage Foundation study released May 6. The Heritage study suggested the Senate-proposed immigration reform bill would cost $6.3 trillion, but it received much criticism for failing to acknowledge the economic benefits that would result from the bill.

U.S. economy would benefit from immigration reform

In contrast to the Heritage study, the Center for American Progress report shows that the U.S. would see an economic boost if Congress approves an immigration reform bill that would legalize some of the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living here.

Specifically, it would add $832 billion to the U.S. economy over a decade. It would also result in Americans seeing a cumulative increase of $470 billion in their personal incomes over 10 years. Furthermore, 121,100 new jobs would be created each year over a 10-year period.

The report also calculated the economic gains for 24 states where 88 percent of undocumented immigrants live. It found that the states’ economies stand to gain the most from the legalization of undocumented immigrants.

One of the states that would gain the most is Texas, where 1.6 million undocumented immigrants reside. If undocumented immigrants were able to gain a legal status, Texas would add $144.6 billion to its economy over a decade, according to the report.

“We see that at the national level as well as at the state level, there is a positive economic benefit—a significant one,” Angela Kelley, vice president for immigration policy and advocacy at the Center for American Progress, said during a call with reporters Friday.

“At a time when our economy is still struggling to make a comeback, it just makes sense to have immigration reform be in the mix as a way of making [the country] strong economically,” she added.

The authors of the Center for American Progress report are Robert Lynch, a professor of economics at Washington College, and Patrick Oakford, a research assistant at the Center for American Progress.

Undocumented immigrants would also make economic gains

Undocumented immigrants themselves would also see significant economic gains following the passage of an immigration reform bill that would allow them to gain a legal status.

Kelley said if undocumented immigrants are given the opportunity to gain a legal status, their chances of landing better paying jobs would increases. She also said they would have access to better training, become better educated and be able to compete for jobs they couldn’t compete for prior to gaining a legal status.

The Center for American Progress report lists five reasons why legalization would lead to an increase in earnings and economic benefits for undocumented immigrants. The report states that receiving legal status and citizenship encourages to invest in their education, makes it easier for them to change jobs when they desire, helps protect them against wage theft, provides them access to better jobs and facilitates entrepreneurship.

The authors of the report conclude stating that overall, undocumented immigrants “are contributing significantly less to the U.S. economy than they potentially could.”

“With legalization and citizenship, undocumented immigrants will produce and earn more, pay more in taxes, boost the American economy, increase the incomes of all Americans, and promote job growth,” the report’s authors write.

VOXXI.COM
Read more: http://www.voxxi.com/u-s-economy-gain-immigration-reform/#ixzz2TpgDsTxh

Here's a mind-blowing statistic from filmmaker Eduardo Lopez: "Approximately 500,000 Latino U.S. citizens will turn 18 every year for the next 20 years."

You don't need to be too much of a mathematician, says Lopez, to figure out the impact this has on the social and political fabric of America. The history behind this immigrant baby-boom is at the core of his feature-length documentary "Harvest of Empire: The Untold Story of Latinos in America," based on writer Juan Gonzalez's book of the same name.

Gonzalez, a New York Daily News columnist and co-host of the daily TV show "Democracy Now," says that the best way to get a grip on the present immigration debate is to track down some of the reasons people leave their home country.

"You cannot really understand the explosion of the Latino community in the U.S. over the past 50, 60 years unless you first understand what has been the United States' role in Latin America, at the end of the 19th century, but most especially in the early 20th century," Gonzalez said. "So that really, the Latino presence in the U.S., is the harvest of the American empire."

"Harvest of Empire," narrated by Gonzalez, uses archival footage, personal stories and census data to document the history of each of the major countries where Latino immigrants come from — Mexico, El Salvador, Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic — and Puerto Rican migrants.

The legacy of U.S.-backed dictatorships

It's a complicated story of uneasy alliances between local governments and American industrial and foreign policy interests. This often meant supporting democracies but mostly, especially during the Cold War, propping up dictatorships. 

A clip from the film shows Mike Wallace on "60 Minutes" in 1979 saying, "To understand where Nicaragua is heading you have to know where it is come from, the young people who are in the street in insurrection regarding a family that has ruled for almost 50 years, a family installed in power by the U.S. government, following 20 years of occupation by the U.S. marines. Though their country was desperately poor, the Somozas amassed a huge personal fortune."

"Harvest of Empire" follows similar patterns of political disruption and turmoil in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cuba and Guatemala, where the U.S.-backed military dictator Efrain Rios Mont was just sentenced for genocide and crimes against humanity and for almost decimating the indigenous Maya population.

So, says filmmaker Eduardo Lopez, tens of thousands of people fled their countries escaping political violence, persecution, poverty, and social and economic instability, and headed to the United States. Once here, says Lopez, himself an immigrant from war-torn El Salvador, many chose not to tell their American-born children how they arrived. He saw their now-grown kids respond to the film.

"They had no idea," Lopez said. "And especially when they see the very difficult images of the war at the time and how it was fought, basically from an army against unarmed civilian population, they're really shocked, because they understand 'This is what my parents actually lived through, and I didn't know it.'"

Human stories, handed down

In the film, celebrated novelist Pico Ayer remembers how his family emigrated from the Dominican Republic in the mid-'70s to escape the Leonidas Trujillo dictatorship.

"I thought we were going up the road to some mystical place," Ayer said. "When I finally saw a map in kindergarten, how far we would go, I was not only astonished but terrified. When I emigrated to New Jersey in 1974, a few months before the fall of Saigon, this was not a place that was very welcoming. I experienced a tremendous amount of racism, not only from white Americans but also from black Americans and Latinos."

Puerto Rico, because it's part of the United States, and Mexico, because it's the largest source of immigrants, occupy a prominent place in the film. There are more than 30 million Mexican immigrants in the U.S.

"More legal Mexican immigrants have come to this country since the 1920s than the Irish, the German, the French — than any other population," Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez says this film is not a story of statistics but of people, a way to provide an historic backdrop for the current immigration debate.

"There's this sense of those who have already settled into and become a part of the fabric of this society, that these newcomers are threats, rather that seeing that the debates really are over what kind of nation are we going to be," he said. "This current debate in Congress is not about immigration reform but about what will be the composition of America in the 21st century. It's not a unique debate, this may be the third or fourth major debate in U.S. history".

"Harvest of Empire" will continue to tour in commercial movie houses, festivals and universities for the next year.

NEWSWORKS.ORG

http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/homepage-feature/item/54892-documentary-recounts-latino-immigration-history-as-harvest-of-american-empire?Itemid=4&linktype=hp_topstory

Leaving cool water in the blazing desert for migrants desperate to risk their lives to enter the United States without the proper paperwork is not a new act of kindness.

Yet, for an aid organization to start a crowdfunding campaign to help them leave water in the desert is new. La Cruz Roja (Red Cross) of Mexico is doing just that. The campaign, dubbed Agua en el desierto, is more than just leaving water in the desert — it’s about leaving coolers.

La Cruz Roja Mexicana wants to raise enough money to build 20 portable coolers that operate without electricity. The units would be left at strategic locations in the deserts of Sonora and Chihuahua. Each portable fridge holds up to 80 chilled bottles of water.

Unlike the U.S. side of the border where similar efforts have only targeted undocumented immigrants, the Mexican project also hopes to help the Tarahumaras Indians whose lands have been severely affected by drought in recent years and who also cross the deserts as part of their lifestyle.

La Cruz Roja Mexicana wants to install the coolers as a way to transform the heat of the desert into a sustainable method of keeping the water cool and accessible to the vulnerable communities that trek through the area.

The campaign’s goal is $68,168. As of this writing, a little over 50 percent of the money has been reached. The campaign ends on May 28, 2013.

LATINALISTA.COM

http://latinalista.com/2013/05/mexicos-red-cross-creates-crowdfunding-campaign-to-build-desert-cooling-stations-for-u-s-bound-migrants