A foundation-funded Welcoming America project is examining “property redistribution,” cooperatives and other economic programs intended to increase opportunities for immigrant families, while related initiatives have helped refugees and immigrants acquire subsidized, discounted or publicly owned properties in U.S. communities.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom.
Welcoming America, an immigration advocacy organization working to increase immigrant and refugee settlement in rural communities, is participating in a $553,134 foundation-funded project that explicitly examines “cooperatives, solidarity economy, and property redistribution” as ways to expand economic opportunities for immigrant families. Related programs promoted by the organization have included matching funds for refugee homebuyers, discounted land-bank properties, sales of city-owned homes to immigrants and tools designed to identify vacant properties that immigrant households could purchase and rehabilitate.
Natalie Winters, co-host of Bannon’s War Room, reported on the research this week, focusing on work involving Welcoming America, an Atlanta-based nonprofit that partners with local governments and other organizations on immigrant integration.
“They’re actually studying PROPERTY REDISTRIBUTION for ‘immigrant inclusion in rural America,’” Winters said in remarks circulated on X.
“The study examined ‘cooperatives, solidarity economy, and property redistribution’ for immigrant families.
“They point to St. Louis, where refugees were getting $2 for every $1 they put down on a house.
“I’m not making this up. They’re the ones saying ‘property redistribution.’”
The language comes from a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-backed project involving Welcoming America and an exchange examining approaches used in Italy to improve economic opportunities for immigrant families and rural communities.
Winters said in a separate account of the project that Welcoming America was awarded $553,134 for a 2024-2026 initiative identified as grant No. 82120.
“‘PROPERTY REDISTRIBUTION’ for immigrant inclusion in rural America,” Winters wrote in a post detailing the initiative.
“Welcoming America was awarded $553,134 by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for a 2024–2026 project studying exactly that.
“Grant #82120 funds a U.S.–Italy exchange examining ‘cooperatives, solidarity economy, and property redistribution’ to improve economic opportunities for immigrant families and their communities.
“The group’s earlier housing guide urged local governments to help immigrants and refugees buy distressed residential properties.
“It highlighted a St. Louis program adding $2 for every $1 refugees saved, and a Detroit program offering eligible homebuyer-counseling participants a 20% discount on land-bank properties.
“The same guide spotlighted Dayton selling more than 40 city-owned homes to Turkish immigrants who became owner-occupants.
“A network operated by Welcoming America with Global Detroit also published a tool covering 23 cities to estimate how many immigrant households could purchase and rehabilitate abandoned properties.
“Separately, taxpayer funding supported the organization’s earlier work: HHS records list more than $1.16 million in federal awards for refugee and community-engagement programs.”
The programs cited by Winters generally involve distressed or abandoned properties, matching assistance, land-bank homes or other mechanisms intended to increase homeownership and rehabilitate vacant housing. The available descriptions do not establish a program for confiscating occupied homes from existing residents and transferring them to immigrants.
That distinction is important because the phrase “property redistribution” can carry a substantially broader political meaning than the individual housing programs described in the research.
Welcoming America openly advocates greater immigrant and refugee integration in smaller communities and describes newcomers as one possible response to population decline and aging in rural America.
Its Rural Welcoming Initiative argues that smaller communities can provide immigrants and refugees with employment, lower living costs and social connections while receiving demographic and economic benefits in return.
“Rural communities often have much to offer immigrant and refugee newcomers: steady employment, a reasonable cost of living, social cohesion, and for many, the chance to live in a place that is similar in size to where they come from,” Welcoming America states.
“While newcomers may initially be drawn to rural places out of economic necessity, they stay when these smaller and more rural places start to feel like home,” the organization continues. “Immigrants and refugees are more likely to feel welcome and experience a sense of belonging when communities have created opportunities that engage them. Rural areas often thrive in return in part because their U.S.-born population is typically older, and newcomers often help revitalize and add vibrancy to rural communities.”
The organization has been described by InfluenceWatch as a left-of-center immigration advocacy organization.
“Welcoming America is a left-of-center immigration activist group that works to increase immigration to the United States and Western countries in general,” InfluenceWatch states. “It works with nonprofits and local governments to implement plans and policies around immigration that will reduce or overcome anti-immigration sentiments and pushes for the incorporation of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) principles to overcome what it claims is America’s state of systemic racism and legacy of colonial oppression.”
Welcoming America’s own description emphasizes integration and economic revitalization rather than racial demographic change.
The controversy has also revived discussion of a United Nations demographic study commonly referred to as “Replacement Migration.”
The United Nations report, published by the U.N. Population Division in 2001, examined how international migration could affect countries facing declining and aging populations because of low birth rates and increased longevity.
The report used “replacement migration” as a demographic term for migration that would be necessary to offset population decline or changes in the ratio of working-age residents to older people.
It did not establish a U.N. program to replace white populations with people of other races. The Population Division described the document as a demographic analysis of different scenarios and explicitly said when it was released that it did not prescribe a “demographic recipe” for governments.
The report nevertheless has remained politically controversial because it quantified how large migration flows would have to become under different population scenarios in Europe, the United States, Japan and other developed countries.
Separate from Welcoming America’s foundation-funded work, Winters has also highlighted an immigration proposal aimed specifically at economically distressed American communities.
The Heartland Visa Act was introduced in December 2024 by Republican Sen. Todd Young of Indiana and then-Sen. Joe Manchin, an independent from West Virginia.
The legislation proposed creating a new visa category for high-skilled foreign workers willing to live in participating U.S. counties experiencing population or economic decline.
It did not become law. The measure was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee at the end of the 118th Congress and would have to be enacted through subsequent legislation before such visas could be issued.
The proposal grew from work by the Economic Innovation Group, a Washington policy organization co-founded by entrepreneur Sean Parker.
EIG’s model would allow qualifying counties to choose whether to participate rather than automatically making communities destinations for visa holders.
The organization recommends a program of at least 100,000 visas annually and estimates that approximately 1,700 counties containing more than 58 million people could meet its proposed eligibility standards.
“In exchange for living in a Heartland Visa community, workers with sufficient earnings will gain permanent residency,” EIG’s proposal states.
Under the group’s model, visa recipients would be required to reside in a participating community for several years but could work for employers located elsewhere. Applicants with higher earnings or high-paying job offers would receive preference.
EIG also proposed using an earnings threshold rather than the traditional labor-certification process for the eventual permanent-residency pathway.
Critics argue that such a structure could introduce additional foreign labor into communities where American workers are already coping with population loss, deindustrialization or stagnant wages.
Supporters contend that voluntary participation would give shrinking communities another way to attract skilled workers, entrepreneurs and taxpayers without forcing counties to join.
Young framed his 2024 legislation in those terms, describing the program as a method of attracting high-skilled legal immigrants to areas that have struggled to share in the economic benefits concentrated in major coastal cities.
The proposal received support from organizations spanning different parts of the political spectrum, including Americans for Prosperity and the Niskanen Center, as well as business and entrepreneurship organizations.
The homeownership programs drawing scrutiny involve a separate but related theory: that immigrants already living in or moving to economically distressed areas can contribute to population stabilization by buying and rehabilitating vacant homes.
Welcoming America’s network and Global Detroit previously developed a tool covering 23 cities that estimated how many immigrant households could afford to acquire and rehabilitate distressed properties.
Programs highlighted in that work included efforts in Detroit, Dayton and St. Louis.
In Detroit, immigrant families were connected with vacant or tax-foreclosed properties available for rehabilitation. Dayton’s program included city-owned homes purchased by Turkish immigrants who became owner-occupants.
In St. Louis, one refugee-focused program offered matching assistance in which eligible buyers could receive additional money based on their own savings.
Those policies can legitimately be debated as questions of immigration, public spending and whether taxpayer-supported housing assistance should favor particular populations.
They are not, however, the same thing as an involuntary transfer of privately owned homes from American citizens to immigrants.
The distinction reflects the broader divide surrounding the initiatives.
Winters and other critics see a coordinated network of foundations, nonprofits and policy organizations using immigration to reshape communities experiencing demographic decline.
Welcoming America and allied organizations describe essentially the same activity as economic development: connecting immigrants with communities that have empty housing, shrinking workforces and aging populations.
The disagreement is likely to intensify as rural population loss becomes a larger policy concern.
Many American counties have lost working-age residents as younger people migrate toward larger metropolitan areas. Policymakers differ sharply over whether immigration should play any role in reversing that decline or whether government policy should instead focus exclusively on increasing opportunities for Americans already living in those communities.
The documents now receiving attention show that immigrant-settlement advocates are not limiting their work to traditional gateway cities.
They have explicitly studied rural immigration, vacant housing, homeownership, economic cooperatives and policies intended to encourage immigrant families to put down permanent roots in smaller American communities.
What remains contested is how those policies should be characterized — as economic revitalization and voluntary immigrant integration, as their sponsors maintain, or as government- and foundation-backed demographic engineering, as critics including Winters argue.
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