Tea at Trianon: ‘The Heartland Visa’: The Push for a New Visa Category to Repopulate American Towns With Foreign Workers

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, October 7, 2026

‘The Heartland Visa’: The Push for a New Visa Category to Repopulate American Towns With Foreign Workers

From Natalie Winters:

The Economic Innovation Group, a think tank co-founded by Facebook’s founding president Sean Parker, spells out the transaction in its Heartland Visa proposal:
“In exchange for living in a Heartland Visa community, workers with sufficient earnings will gain permanent residency”
A struggling town supplies the address. Washington supplies the immigration pathway. Foreign workers receive the prospect of a green card, while the Americans already living there receive another promise of economic revival.
The ambition is national. EIG’s blueprint identifies more than 1,700 potentially eligible counties, home to 58 million people. It proposes a minimum of 100,000 visas annually.
These communities’ economic pain has become the sales pitch for changing who lives in them.
And the campaign is still being pushed in Washington.
EIG’s first-quarter 2026 lobbying disclosure lists Heartland Visas and the Heartland Visa Act of 2024. Its second-quarter filing, submitted July 20, names them again. Together, the filings report $360,000 in lobbying expenses across the organization’s policy agenda; they do not break out spending on this visa campaign.
The documents name John Lettieri and Catherine Lyons as lobbyists. This is an organized effort to turn a demographic proposal into federal policy. (Read more.)