Yet More On Charleroi

An article in yesterday's City Journal fleshes out a litrtle more on the coordination between the federal government, NGOs, staffing agencies, and local power players that's behind the sudden migration of quasi-legal immigrants to places like Charleroi, PA, but it really doesn't add much that's new. First, there's the federal government:

[T]he White House has admitted more than 210,000 Haitians through its controversial Humanitarian Parole Program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV), which it paused in early August and has since relaunched. The program is presented as a “lawful pathway,” but critics, such as vice presidential candidate J. D. Vance, have called it an “abuse of asylum laws” and warned of its destabilizing effects on communities across the country.

The article then immediately skips to NGOs while only briefly recognizing that it's the federal government that's using the NGOs to pass through funding (less their skim), as well as to funnel the immigrants into federal programs:

The next link in the web [sic] is the network of publicly funded NGOs that provide migrants with resources to assist in travel, housing, income, and work. These groups are called “national resettlement agencies,” and serve as the key middleman in the flow of migration. The scale of this effort is astounding. These agencies are affiliated with more than 340 local offices nationwide and have received some $5.5 billion in new awards since 2021. And, because they are technically non-governmental institutions, they are not required to disclose detailed information about their operations.

I'd feel much more comfortable with pieces like this if the writers could avoid phrases like "link in the web". What other elementary defects are in their thought processes? But this does echo the questions other observers have had about who's paying for what in Springfield and Charleroi -- the immigrants somehow drive new cars, for instance, although they don't know how to drive. I think if I were the reporters writing this story, it would bother me a lot more than it bothers these.

Next are the staffing agencies:

A network of staffing agencies and private companies has recruited the migrants to the city’s factories and assembly lines. While some recruitment happens through word-of-mouth, many staffing agencies partner with local nonprofits that specialize in refugee resettlement to find immigrants who need work. . . . three staffing agencies—Wellington Staffing Agency, Celebes Staffing Services, and Advantage Staffing Agency—are key conduits for labor in the city. None have websites, advertise their services, or appear in job listings.

The agencies work closely with local sweatshop employers and slumlords, who often turn out to be the same people:

At the center of this system in Charleroi is Fourth Street Foods, a frozen-food supplier with approximately 1,000 employees, most of whom work on the assembly line. . . . The firm employs many temporary workers, and, with the arrival of the Haitians, has found a new group of laborers willing to work long days in an industrial freezer, starting at about $12 an hour.

The final link is housing. And here, too, Fourth Street Foods has an organized interest. . . . The owner of the company, David Barbe, stepped in, acquiring and renovating a “significant number of homes” to provide housing for his workforce. A property search for David Barbe and his other business, DB Rentals LLC, shows records of more than 50 properties, many of which are concentrated on the same streets.

After the initial purchases, Barbe required some of the existing residents to vacate to make room for newcomers. A single father, who spoke on condition of anonymity, was forced to leave his home after it was sold to DB Rentals LLC in 2021. “[W]e had to move out [on] very short notice after five years of living there and being great tenants,” he explained. Afterward, a neighbor informed him that a dozen people of Asian descent had been crammed into the two-bedroom home. They were “getting picked up and dropped off in vans.”

The piece omits other issues, especially occupancy laws. A dozen people in a two-bedroom home seems out of line, but the reporters here didn't follow up. What are the occupancy limits in Charleroi? Has anyone tried to report the situation? What was the result? This isn't much different from the problem of Haitians driving cars they don't know how to drive in Springfield, with local law enforcement looking the other way. Who's behind this? City Journal talks about it only in general terms:

the benefits of mass migration seem to accrue to the organized interests, while citizens and taxpayers absorb the costs. No doubt, the situation is advantageous to David Barbe of Fourth Street Foods, who can pay $16 an hour to the agencies that employ his contract labor force, then recapture some of those wages in rent—just like the company towns from a century ago.

. . . The evictions, the undercut wages, the car crashes, the cramped quarters, the unfamiliar culture: these are not trivialities, nor are they racist conspiracy theories. They are the signs of a disconcerting reality: Charleroi is a dying town that could not revitalize itself on its own, which made it the perfect target for “revitalization” by elite powers—the federal government, the NGOs, and their local satraps.

I don't understand the fatalism here. On one hand, Charleroi somehow can't revitalize itself on its own, but on the other, traffic laws, occupancy limits, and other local ordinances apparently aren't enforced, while federal laws on immigration either aren't enforced or bypassed by fiat -- and the writers at City Journal throw up their hands and say there's nothing they can do. Nothing, apparently, but blame Trump:

Former president Donald Trump, echoing the sentiments of some of Charleroi’s native citizens, has cast the change in a sinister light. As he told the crowd at a recent rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania, “it takes centuries to build the unique character of each state. . . . But reckless migration policy can change it quickly and permanently.”

It's all Trump's fault for bringing the whole thing up. Of course, that was something the journalists should have been doing before now, except they wouldn't have paid attention unless Trump brought it up. The thing I notice here, though, is how little actual effort the City Journal writers have put in to document much beyond what several amateur and part-time investigators have already revealed.

Who enforces the occupancy laws in Charleroi? Did the reporters try to interview anyone? How about the traffic laws? What does the police chief have to say? The mayor? I'd be ashamed to have my byline on this piece.