TY  - EJOU
AU  - Oshal, O. Tavren
TI  - Refugees’ IQs are Normatively Consequential
T2  - Journal of Controversial Ideas

PY  - 2025
VL  - 5
IS  - 3
SN  - 2694-5991

AB  - Responding to an article by Rindermann et al. (2024), which reports that refugees in Germany, on average, have significantly lower intelligence than the German host population, Bradley Hillier-Smith has argued that such cognitive disparities – if they exist – are irrelevant to states’ moral duties toward refugees. This article challenges his position. It further contends that even if we adopt a cosmopolitan perspective that denies states the right to prioritize the interests of their own populations, it is not clear that states in the Global North are morally required – or even permitted – to admit large numbers of relatively low-IQ refugees from the Global South. This, I show, is especially true given that assistance could instead take the form of supporting their relocation to a safe country within the region.
KW  - refugees
KW  - migration
KW  - intelligence
KW  - hereditarianism
KW  - innovation
KW  - Global South
KW  - nationalism
KW  - cosmopolitanism
DO  - 10.63466/jci05030006