Commentary

They Want the Towns to Feel Like Home

Posted on by Bill McCarthy

The programs exist. Some are official resettlement channels that place refugees where housing and jobs can be found. Others are private sponsorship models and foundation-funded campaigns that train rural leaders, reshape local narratives, and identify counties as suitable for more newcomers. The stated reasons are labor shortages, aging populations, and the moral claim that smaller places should welcome people. The documented activity includes narrative training aimed at politically diverse rural communities and county-level maps that flag places in red states for additional immigration. The question is whether the incompatibility is accidental or the point.

What is actually running

Welcoming America runs a Rural Welcoming Initiative. Participating communities get technical assistance, coaching, free network membership, and pairings with other rural places. The description is straightforward: rural areas offer steady employment, a reasonable cost of living, and social cohesion. Newcomers may arrive for the jobs and stay when the place feels like home. U.S.-born populations in those counties are older; newcomers are said to revitalize them. The initiative supports Welcoming Week events and local policy alignment with a “Welcoming Standard.”

Foundation money backs the narrative side. A Carnegie award of $500,000 approved in December 2025 is described as an effort to reshape the narrative about immigrants in new destination states. The two-year project emphasizes rural and politically diverse communities, with narrative training and a multimedia campaign intended to reach more than 150,000 people. An earlier Carnegie grant in 2021 funded a rural immigrant-inclusion campaign that planned to engage 15 rural communities, develop policies and programs in 10, and train 25 rural leaders. A Mott award of $250,000 targets community foundations with welcoming plans and narrative tools. These are not secret. They are grant records.

The Biden-era Welcome Corps allowed groups of five or more citizens or permanent residents to privately sponsor refugees by raising a set amount per person, securing housing, and providing 90 days of support. Recommendations that shaped similar models came from a consortium that included the Niskanen Center, which has received Open Society (Soros) funding, along with other advocacy groups. The program was ended in February 2025 after the new administration directed that refugee admissions be limited to those who can fully assimilate and that taxpayer resources be preserved for citizens. Traditional resettlement agencies—Church World Service, the Ethiopian Community Development Council, and others—still operate under the reduced federal ceiling and place people where local affiliates can find apartments and entry-level work. Some of those placements land in smaller towns. Meatpacking, agriculture, and food processing have long drawn secondary migrants from initial city placements into rural counties.

The numbers and the places

No single NGO is “inundating” rural America under a current federal surge. Refugee admissions have been cut sharply. What continues is the combination of residual official placements, private or church-based sponsorship where it still occurs, secondary movement for jobs, and the foundation campaigns that treat rural resistance as a narrative problem to be solved. Niskanen’s November 2025 mapping exercise identified hundreds of counties nationwide as suitable for more immigration and listed seven in Tennessee—Hamblen, Knox, Madison, Maury, Moore, Sevier, and Wilson—among them. Those are not the densest urban cores. They are the places where a few hundred new arrivals change the school demographics, the clinic caseload, and the political texture faster than they change them in a city of a million.

Rural industries have lobbied for the workers. Aging towns have empty houses and declining school enrollments. The economic case is real for the packing plants and the nursing homes. The cultural and fiscal case is the one the campaigns do not lead with. Large shares of recent refugee and asylee cohorts from certain regions arrive with limited English, low formal schooling, and high rates of means-tested benefit use in the first years. When those households are placed in counties that previously had low welfare rolls and high social trust, the schools, the emergency rooms, and the property-tax base absorb the difference. The narrative grants exist because the local reaction has often been negative. The training is designed to change the reaction.

Why the rural focus

Urban areas already contain the institutions, the language services, and the political majorities that treat high immigration as a settled good. Rural counties, particularly in the interior, have been the places that voted against it. Placing people there does three things at once. It supplies labor to industries that prefer lower wage bills. It creates clients for the service nonprofits that receive per-capita resettlement funding. And it alters the electorate and the school population in jurisdictions that have been hardest for the national progressive coalition to win. The Carnegie language is “reshape the narrative” in “politically diverse” communities. The Welcoming America language is belonging and revitalization. Both treat local skepticism as the obstacle rather than the data on assimilation speed, welfare use, or crime differentials in some cohorts.

Incompatibility is not a slogan. It is the measurable gap in language, skills, fertility patterns, and attitudes toward the host country’s rules that shows up in the Census and in the benefit rolls. A program that deliberately seeds that gap into counties that have not asked for it, while funding the messaging to call the resulting tension a failure of welcome, is not neutral humanitarianism. It is a demographic and political strategy that uses the refugee channel, the private-sponsorship model, and the foundation grant to reach places the ballot box has not yet delivered. The current administration has narrowed the official pipe. The NGOs and the grant-makers have not abandoned the map. The towns are still on it.

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