Intelligence Tests and World War Two

In the news has been articles about the changes to the immigration act. This reminds me of what I read in "The Mismeasure of Man" by Stephen J. Gould, the moral of which is: what criteria are you applying to make up the new guidelines?

Binet created the "Intelligence Test" to identify children that needed help learning. That's it. He knew that "intelligence" wasn't really a good term, that there is no one thing that could be called "intelligence", and certainly that it shouldn't be used to judge, but to inform to help.

But the idea of the test was taken up, and taken to America, and it was decided that intelligence tests could be applied to everyone, that it does measure "intelligence" and this is something we can measure people by.

On applying all the tests (which were really measuring how well one understood American culture of the time), they found out that recent immigrants weren't intelligent. (Read: didn't get the American culture.) Immigrants from longer ago did score highly... which clearly meant that the more intelligent ones had immigrated earlier, and now only the dregs were coming.

This all fed into the 1924 Immigration Act, which set quotas on how many people from European countries could come in. Including Jews, who were trying to flee from a certain disastrous turning in Germany.

So, when the purges and WWII hit, there were more Jews in Germany that would have been had the quotas not been set as the data was understood from the "intelligence tests". (And no, I'm not saying this is the one underlying cause for everything wrong. That would be stupid.)

While we may want to change our immigration laws, this might be good. Or... again, just what criteria is being used to decide who gets in?

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