Crossposted from PolluterWatch.

If you were the Koch brothers and you wanted to connect better with Latino and Hispanic voters, after you just dumped millions of your own cash into a presidential election that didn’t go in your favor, you’d probably be annoyed if one of your favorite front groups started undermining your voter outreach.

That’s exactly what’s happening with the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation. Heritage is having a public relations crisis after releasing a contentious report claiming that immigration reform would cost $6.3 trillion over the next 50 years, indebting taxpayers to support people who live in the U.S. illegally. The offensive kicker is that the Heritage report’s freshly-resigned co-author, Jason Richwine, previously published a dissertation claiming that Hispanic and Latino immigrants have lower IQs than White people.

Here’s a helpful meme for Mr. Richwine:

As Heritage Foundation is one of the billionaire Koch brothers’ favorite groups to implement their political agenda–receiving more than $2.7 million from Koch-controlled foundations since 2005–this is a poor start for the Kochs’ new interest in reaching Hispanic and Latino voters in the U.S.

Amid the fiasco, Heritage pulled out of Buzzfeed’s forum on immigration sponsored by the Charles Koch Institute. See infighting over Heritage’s assumptions about how so-called “illegals” contribute to the U.S. economy from the Koch-funded Reason Foundation, of which David Koch is a trustee. Continue reading →