Saint Louis NGO: Let's Become 'Little Kabul'

David Strom:

Saint Louis has been losing population for decades, and the City "Birthing Persons" have been rightly worried that they need to find a way to reverse the hollowing out.
The solution they have latched onto is to become 'Little Kabul' by luring in Afghan migrants and other "diverse" populations to replace the native-born Americans who have been leaving.

🚨 Three months of FREE RENT. A security deposit. Monthly gift cards until food stamps kick in.

That’s the offer to Afghan families relocating to St. Louis through the International Institute of St. Louis.

The organization’s broader plan? Reshape the city’s demographic future… pic.twitter.com/i3x83RB2Yd
— Natalie Winters (@nataliegwinters) September 28, 2026

It's an interesting plan for many reasons, not just the most obvious one: it is insane. Common sense tells you that making massive, abrupt demographic changes, even if the cultures involved are largely compatible, is a recipe for trouble.
And common sense should tell you that importing more people who, by your own plan, will be clients for welfare and other services will not strengthen your city but will financially strain or bankrupt it.
And common sense says that importing large numbers of people from a wildly different culture that rejects Western values is a recipe for disaster.
Yes, but if you run an NGO that gets tens of millions of dollars from the government to serve "clients," connect them to welfare, and "welcome" refugees, this sounds like a gold mine.
The International Institute of Saint Louis has produced a plan that proposes to implement a massive demographic shift to the City of Saint Louis. The stated goal is to boost the population and make it more diverse because, after all, "diversity is our strength," and the mechanism is to throw tons of government and NGO benefits at newcomers to make Saint Louis a magnet for foreigners.
….
The goal is obvious: replace a recalcitrant population that already dislikes the direction the city is taking with a population that will be client-dependent on the city government and the NGOs that will serve them.
It's a bold strategy. Replace the population with a more malleable one, and call it success.
The International Institute is doing what institutions always do: view every problem through the lens of their own institutional interest. It is almost an iron law that no matter what the stated goal or original intent of a structure is/was, its true purpose over time is to grow and perpetuate itself, and what better way for the Institute to do so than import a new population to Saint Louis that is utterly dependent on government and NGO benefits?
There's all the usual blather about the importance of diversity, how new immigrants will lead to blossoming prosperity, and of course about how this will make Missouri the envy of every other NGO-heavy Blue region, but once you dig into the details, it's clear that the only prosperity resulting from this plan will be for the Immigrant industrial complex.
After all, you don't build prosperity by luring people in with free rent and free food, plus help hooking them up with government benefits. That's a recipe for draining the public purse, not refilling it.
The focus is on attracting Afghans, not because Afghans are especially known as a high-skill workforce, but because the Institute has a program focused on them. It's something they already do well, so let's put more money into an existing program and call it "revitalization."
The plan is to betray the population of the region, shut them out of the planning by "insulating" the decision-makers from backlash, and ultimately replace the current citizenry with a class of clients who depend on the elite.
It's a technocrat's dream.