Refugees’ IQs are Normatively Consequential

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.