What's the average IQ of Haitians?

It's fascinating how the liberal establishment has doubled down on sacralizing Haitians.

One of the most controversial things Donald Trump ever said was to suggest that, judging by the state of their respective countries, Norwegians would tend to make better immigrants than Haitians.

Now another Trump is in trouble over Haiti.

From the New York Times’ news section:

Donald Trump Jr. Piles On With Racist Comments About Haitians

After former President Donald J. Trump spread debunked claims that immigrants from Haiti were eating pets, his son cast more aspersions on Haitian immigrants.

By Simon J. Levien

Sept. 14, 2024, 1:54 p.m. ET

Amid fallout from Donald J. Trump’s debunked claim about immigrants from Haiti stealing and eating people’s pets in a small Ohio city, the former president’s oldest son weighed in with his own aspersions on Haitians.

Donald Trump Jr. suggested on Thursday that Haitian immigrants were less intelligent than people from other countries, and claimed that there was demographic evidence to back this up. He provided none.

“You look at Haiti, you look at the demographic makeup, you look at the average I.Q. — if you import the third world into your country, you’re going to become the third world,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with Charlie Kirk on Real America’s Voice, a conservative broadcasting network. “That’s just basic. It’s not racist. It’s just fact.”

Claims inherently linking race, nationality and intelligence have long played a role in scientific racism, which uses pseudoscience to try to justify false claims of racial inferiority or superiority. And intelligence quotient testing, a commonly used measure of intelligence, has long been criticized as unreliable. …

The National Haitian American Elected Officials Network, a nonpartisan group for Haitian American politicians, rejected Mr. Trump’s comments about Haitians and intelligence.

“That is so sad,” said Mary Estimé-Irvin, the group’s chairwoman. “The campaign is desperate.”

If you can’t trust the National Haitian American Elected Officials Network to be the experts on The Science, who can you trust?

Seriously, there is a fair amount of data out there, both from school achievement test scores and IQ tests. Those aren’t the same things, but they correlate closely.

For example, the World Bank publishes a database of Harmonized Learning Outcomes of international school achievement test scores, all harmonized on an SAT-like scale where 500 is the First World average and the standard deviation is 100. (I explained the World Bank’s methodology at length a couple of years ago.)

Not surprisingly, Singapore comes in first in the World Bank’s student test score ranking and Haiti comes in 163rd out of 174 countries:

Of course, the countries at the top of the graph have more datapoints. The Singaporeans, for instance, have 27 test scores on international exams, ranging from 526 to 622. They find participating in international tests like PISA to be a blast: We win again! We’re Number One!

In contrast, Haiti only has two data points, from the Early Grades Reading Assessments in 2012 and 2013: Our students, you tell us, aren’t as sharp or well-schooled as Estonian students. OK … swell … You want to test us again? You know what? Don’t call us, we’ll call you.

Here’s the same data, with the race/ethnicity of the main group in each country indicated by color:

And below is Emil Kirkegaard’s compilation of the average score of six national IQ databases. I’m just graphing countries that appear in all six. I believe these are listed on the traditional IQ basis where 100 is the average of white Brits and white Americans, with a standard deviation of 15. Haiti doesn’t score quite as bottom of the barrel as in the World Bank’s test score database, in part because more sub-Saharan countries have IQ estimates than have participated in international school achievement tests.

Haiti’s IQ scores in the six databases are kind of all over the map: 63.2, 67.0, 78.0, 78.6, 78.6, and 88.6 for an average of 75.7. So, don’t put too much faith in any one score.

Overall, Haiti scores about as well (or poorly) on the World Bank’s Test scores (1.62 standard deviations, 100, below the benchmark of 500) as on the average of the six IQ compilations (also 1.62 standard deviations, 15, below the benchmark of 100).

Many upper middle class white Americans assume than any IQ score in the 60s or 70s can only be caused by organic retardation, such as Down’s syndrome, because any children in their extended families with IQs that low are funny-looking kids.

A couple of decades ago, for example, the US Supreme Court ruled that murderers with IQs below 70 or 75 couldn’t be executed because they were too organically retarded to understand “Thou shalt not kill.” But that decision reflected the prejudices fostered by the high IQ family and friends of Supreme Court justices, while demonstrating ignorance of broad American realities.

Because that’s not true in many other swaths of American society, much less in the Third World. If African-Americans average 85 with a standard deviation of 15, then 75.7 would be about the 27th percentile for black Americans, or pretty normal.

The modern age of IQ science began in the 1960s when schoolteachers at Berkeley, CA public schools asked UC Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen to look into a conundrum they faced: When school IQ tests reported that white students (many of them children of Berkeley professors) had IQs of 70, they almost always were obviously organically retarded (Funny Looking Kids, as obstetricians say in their notes) and couldn’t socialize well with the other kids on the playground. When black kids scored 70, however, most were normal looking and were treated as normal by other kids on the playgrounds.

Jensen assumed the IQ test must be racially biased. But he discovered it was equally valid for both races, predicting the future course of educational achievement equally well for both 70 IQ whites and blacks. Instead, the black bell curve of IQ just fell about one standard deviation lower than white bell curve, so a 70 was just one SD below the mean for blacks (16th percentile) but two 2 SDs for whites (2nd percentile).

Interestingly, neighboring Dominican Republic doesn’t score all that much better, but has a much more comfortable per capita GDP.

Now, of course, neither type of score necessarily represents a permanent genetic limit. If US blacks average around 85 and are 20% white, then, if DNA were all that mattered, 100% black sub-Saharans would average in the low 80s. But many sub-Saharan countries see much lower scores than that, suggesting that, unsurprisingly, nurture matters as well as nature.

Haiti is likewise a weak athletic country, with its last Olympic medal coming in 1928. Its national soccer team has qualified for the World Cup once, back in 1974. On the other hand, Haitian-Americans are now not uncommon in the NFL, suggesting that Haiti’s environment is bad for athletic accomplishment, and probably for cognitive performance as well. In contrast, Dominican Republic is athletically strong, producing the world’s best baseball players per capita and becoming a respectable second tier power in Olympic track, winning the women’s 400 meter race at the 2024 Paris games.

No doubt Haiti has suffered massively from brain drain to France, Quebec, and the United States, especially since the Black Power regime of Papa Doc Duvalier came to power in 1957 and began to persecute the mulatto elite. How far down in the barrel of Haitian human capital recent migrants are being scraped from is not a question the media really wants to look into.

Yet, despite all the brain draining, Wikipedia’s list of notable Haitian-Americans is not particularly stellar. The greatest Haitian-American is the white John James Audubon, who is currently being cancelled. The Haitian-American most in the news recently is disgraced ex-Harvard president Claudine Gay.

Why have liberals become so extremist about Haitian immigrants in recent years? Recall one of the biggest political disasters of the Biden Administration came in 2021 when it went nuts over photographs from the Rio Grande of mounted Border Patrolmen, many of them no doubt Hispanic, swinging their reins to keep 15,000 Haitian invaders under control.

Not that many years ago, the Democrats were more pro-Hispanic than they are in the 2020s. They were counting on Hispanic immigrants to tip Florida and Texas blue the way they had to California. But that hasn’t happened yet, in part because blacks objected to Democrats glamorizing Latinos and Latinos objected to Democrats giving in to blacks as crazily as they did after George Floyd’s demise.

But Haitians are both immigrants and blacks!

And if you think of Haiti as an outpost of Africa in the New World, then think of all the black pre-Americans in Africa.

Victory on the question of Haitian immigrants could open the floodgates to African immigrants.