250 years ago, the United States was the first nation of European settlers to declare independence from the sovereigns of Europe, and Rhode Island was the first colony to declare itself free of British rule.
In May of 1776, Rhode Island declared independence from Great Britain a full two months ahead of the ratification of the Declaration of Independence by the 13 Colonies assembled. Yet Rhode Island was also the last of the original 13 Colonies to adopt the U.S. Constitution. Rhode Island has served as a representation of “America in miniature” since before there was a United States of America. This tradition continues today, but in a much darker way as the state faces the same threat from mass immigration and demographic change as so much of the rest of the nation.
Rhode Island’s experiment in mass immigration is radically transforming that state into something unrecognizable and bereft of what made it great in the first place. It’s impossible for any American attentive to politics to miss the recent developments in immigrant welfare fraud or the incredible rise of crime in the Providence area. This is no different than the burden on European welfare states by mass immigration. Nor is it any different than the gang violence that has affected various European nations and American states.
It was not always like this, of course. Diversity is relatively new to Rhode Island.
In the year 1960, just five years before the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act that would throw open America’s borders, Rhode Island was over 96% White American. In the year 1970, when America’s foreign-born population reached its historic low of less than 5%, the foreign-born population of Rhode Island was low at just 7.8% (and the lowest it had been since 1950) and overwhelmingly European in origin. Rhode Island was not only one of the most homogeneous states in the United States, but it was one of the most homogeneous societies on the planet in terms of background, faith, language, and customs. This was a characteristic that it shared with the European countries of the time which were all well above 90% ethnically and religiously homogeneous. Then the era of mass immigration began.
The 1965 Immigration Act, the 1990 Immigration Act, huge waves of refugee resettlement from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and the general unwillingness of consecutive administrations of both parties to enforce American borders and deport illegal aliens has led to a Rhode Island that is demographically distressed. Today, the White Rhode Islander population – the foundational population – is just 69% and rapidly falling. In cities such as Providence the share is even lower with Whites being just 33% of the city’s population in the 2020 census. All too related is the massive increase in the immigrant population that has driven this change. The foreign-born population of Rhode Island is now around 16% while the illegal alien population numbers about 59,000 individuals and about 5.4% of the state’s population.
The Democratic governor of Rhode Island has come out strongly in favor of continued mass immigration into the state, against the wishes of the population. This is in spite of polling that shows a majority of Rhode Islanders oppose legislation that would make Rhode Island a sanctuary state, and many Rhode Islanders feel the Federal government is not doing enough to tackle illegal immigration. In fact the people of Rhode Island have long favored a stricter immigration policy such as in 2011 when they were in favor of passing similar state-level immigration laws to those enacted by Arizona, Texas, and other Southwestern states on the front line of illegal immigration.
Still, the state is led by a wildly pro-immigration political class. The Rhode Island state government has allowed immigrants, legal and illegal, to join the state’s healthcare program and receive taxpayer-funded healthcare in various ways.
The state has also become a hub of foreign lobbying influences. Recently officials from the Dominican Republic and other sending countries have engaged with local immigrant communities in the Providence area and implored them to provide resources to their ethnic homelands. This funding is not provided by the immigrant community alone but often involves Rhode Island taxpayers additional to substantial remittances from the US to the Dominican Republic. A disproportionate share of welfare and child assistance funding in the state goes to immigrant communities from Latin America and elsewhere, despite the fact they represent a small share of the state’s entire population. This massive level of spending should have served as an obvious warning to the massive level of welfare fraud that has been discovered in various states. U.S. attorneys have charged numerous people involved in escalating welfare and services fraud scandals that were systematized by certain immigrant communities and may have even been tolerated and abetted by progressive state governments. One example that stands out is that of Jesus Matos Perez and William Jose Alejandro Arias Amador were sentenced to federal prison for using stolen identities to secure approximately $75,000 in Medicaid, SNAP, and unemployment benefits over a decade-long period. These groups, it turns out, are not the same honest hard-working Western Christians that came from Europe to create Rhode Island. It is time for Rhode Island to change course.
The demographic and (some of) the social decline of Rhode Island can be modestly reversed through a mix of state-level policy and concerted cooperation with federal authorities. The first step is to deal with illegal immigrants in the state, of which there are an estimated 59,000 (plus their children). By removing all welfare benefits for illegal aliens, passing mandatory E-Verify laws, and enforcing extant federal laws such as the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 that fines employers for employing illegals, the state can rapidly entice this population to self-deport to other more illegal-friendly locales (or preferably, their home countries). These policies should also be combined with widespread and mandatory state and local law enforcement cooperation with ICE and other federal authorities to speed up the detention and deportation of illegal aliens.
The next step is to deal with the very large legal immigrant population in the state, many of whom will have committed fraud to enter the country, gain legal status, and in many cases citizenship. 70% of immigrants in the United States are admitted on the basis of family ties, not for work or school. This means that a large portion of people who have acquired US citizenship did so via fraud. The proof for this is best demonstrated by a 2008 incident wherein the U.S. State Department discovered, through DNA testing, that over 80% of individuals admitted into the U.S. as a family member of a “refugee” were not related to that individual. The US government has since mandated DNA testing for refugees who request their family members come to the US, but this DNA testing mandate has not been put in place for any other category of family reunification.
Further proof can be found in operations such as those conducted in various states in which immigration officers visited legal migrants and found that a staggering percentage had committed some form of fraud, crime, or otherwise posed a national security threat to the American people. The best example being the display of immigration deceit that was put on display during Operation Twin Shield in Minnesota in 2025. Furthermore, the federal government has found that USCIS needs much better enforcement of H1B verification, that as many as 20% of H1B suspects investigated are involved in program violations or fraud, and it suspects that the number is even higher but, due to a lack of enforcement, we simply do not know. It is time for states to step up and begin investigating and enabling federal investigations of the massive fraud in our legal immigration system.
Were Rhode Island to provide support and resources to the federal government to conduct a similar, much larger, operation in the state (including reviewing naturalizations), then it is entirely within the realm of possibility that of the roughly 120,000 legal immigrants in the state, some 60,000 have committed a similar fraud, crime, or pose a national security threat. A further several thousand children of immigrants can be added to this count, as they would need to depart the country with their now visa-deprived or denaturalized parents.
Were these policies to be implemented comprehensively then Rhode Island could see a decline in its foreign-born population from 16% today to roughly 8% post-remigration. The overall state population would decline from about 1.1 million to roughly 1.02 million and the White American share of the population would increase to around 78%, a meaningful 10-point increase on the current demographic.
Building further on this success would require voluntary paid remigration programs, which White Papers proposes here. If the U.S. were to implement such a program, the White share of the Rhode Island population would return to about 85% or higher assuming minimal African American departure. If other groups took the opportunity to voluntarily depart, this share would increase further.
The demographic decline of Rhode Island is a policy choice that state and federal lawmakers have made for too long. Americans can decide to reverse this decline. Remigration is the start of that process and the foundation from which the revival of our nation can begin.