WHAT’S HAPPENING
A progressive advocacy organization backed by juggernaut foundations spent years building a campaign to push immigration into rural America and transform these communities.
Welcoming America operates what amounts to a nationwide persuasion machine, training local advocates, funding cultural events, and teaching activists how to overcome their neighbors' resistance to demographic change.
THE FACTS
Welcoming America's rural toolkit tells activists to use storytelling that "celebrate[s] the demographic change of the community."
The organization's messaging guide teaches advocates that "Perception trumps reality" and "Emotion trumps logic" when selling immigration.
Carnegie Corporation and Mott Foundation, holding combined endowments of roughly $9 billion, are bankrolling the campaign.
Carnegie approved $500,000 in December 2025 specifically to "reshape the narrative about immigrants in new destination states" in politically diverse rural areas.
The campaign trains local advocates to host community events, control local media narratives, and draft pro-immigration messaging for their own towns.
Participants in the 2023 rural program received individualized coaching and were required to develop inclusion goals and draft narratives celebrating immigration.
A diversity coalition director in Wabash County, Indiana, openly stated the goal: "Our ultimate measure of success is whether our population grows."
These groups are using local media to highlight immigrant entrepreneurs and recorded personal stories illustrating "demographic transformation."
OUR TAKE
Progressives don’t see rural communities as distinct American communities worthy of respect. They simply see an opportunity to exploit them to cram down immigration and transform these communities to be progressive bastions. In their view, rural America is a problem to be solved.
It’s going to take the members of these rural areas and their political leaders, churches, and businesses that hold them together, to push back and decide just how drastically they want their communities to change.
