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Comment by bthrm | Hacker News Reader

In TFA it says this drop in IQ was detected because of tests done to people who sign up to the military. I’m talking about how there are more and more immigrants joining the military here as years pass and that if in Norway the same is happening it’s normal that IQ is dropping as I expect immigrants to have a lower IQ than natives.

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Immigrants may have lower IQ score because of cultural barrier, e.g. Spanish is foreign language for them, so they will fail association tests.

This language barrier is partially what motivated the development of the Raven progressive matrices test. The test was used by the UK military to judge recruits without creating a bias based off of the recruits language.

Why would you expect that?

>... I expect immigrants to have a lower IQ than natives.

Do you have any reason other than Xenophobia for expecting this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nations_and_intelligence

Do you have any reason to suggest all nations have the same average IQ?

If the controversial citations in the article you cited are true (which I haven't read in detail, but seem questionable at a glance.) - unless the predominant amount of individuals immigrating into Spain/Norway are coming from countries with lower average IQs I would not expect it to have an effect on the average IQ of Spain/Norway.

It also stands to reason that there is no reason to assume Spain is at the top of the chart when it comes to national average - so they are most likely also having immigration from countries with a higher average. This would mitigate the effect of countries with a lower average, would it not?

Returning to the original point:

Because immigration usually entails an amount of merit and ability - the successful immigrants are usually at the higher end of the capability spectrum of the originating countries population.

Doesn't it stand to reason immigration would have either a minuscule or positive effect on national average IQ?

Maybe pre-2015, but since the European Migrant Crisis, there has been a disproportionate amount of migration from sub-Saharan Africa, which is the region that scores lowest in those surveys.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10840/spain-migrant-crisi...

For the same reason the Flynn effect exists I guess. Most immigrants come from less developed countries so should have a lower IQ on average.

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