What About The Haitians In Charleroi. PA?
The influx of immigrants in Charleroi has divided residents over whether or not they are a welcome addition to their community.
Former president Donald Trump put a spotlight on the topic during a rally last week in Arizona, sharing how the population of Haitian migrants in the town had grown by 2,000%.
"Charleroi, what a beautiful name, but it's not so beautiful now," Trump said.
KDKA-TV first reported in March how we were told the immigrant population in Charleroi has grown by more than 2000% in the last two years. The majority of students in the local school district who need assistance learning English are from Haiti. The district has spent $400,000 on ELL teachers and an interpreter. Trump touched on that impact during his speech.
We see all the right notes, Trump stirring up trouble, residents divided, strain on resources, many locals deplorable:
"You can't even walk through the town without being next to them or them pestering you about something," life-long Charleroi resident Raymond Pappas said of the immigrants.
When asked why he had a problem standing next to immigrants, Pappas said, "Well it's not really a problem it's just that they make you feel uncomfortable."
Pappas is not alone in his belief. Off-camera, a number of neighbors told us they were either reluctant or refused to go downtown because of the immigrant population. Some said they were planning to leave the city soon, while others said the immigrants should go back to where they came from.
But the local politicians and law enforcement officials beg to disagree. Imagine that, sounds just like Springfield, OH!
Kristin R. Hopkins, the president of the Charleroi Borough, said the borough expresses "deep concern" over the representation of their community's challenges.
"Trump chose to exploit our town for political purposes, using divisive rhetoric to unfairly target the Haitian immigrant community," Hopkins wrote.
She says the city has seen a population rise for the first time in decades. She says Haitian immigrants have been "unjustly scapegoated" for many of Charleroi's problems.
"Rather than acknowledging the real economic issues the town is facing, some have chosen to unfairly target the Haitian community, judging the entire group based on misinformation and fear of outsiders," Hopkins said, adding welcoming immigrants is part of the town's history and that the focus should be about solutions, like what should be down about the job loss at the Anchor-Hocking plant.
MSN brings in another stock character, Charleroi Regional Police Chief Chad Zelinsky, who denies the Hatians are a problem:
Mr. Zelinsky is adamant that he and his team have seen no increase in crime in the half-decade during which the town’s population has swelled by up to 50% due to immigration — largely from Haiti, but also from West African and Asian countries. In fact, the chief compares today’s situation favorably to a few years ago, when opioid-addicted “zombies” were more common.
And oddly enough, just like in Springfield, he's backed up by another local pol:
Former Charleroi Mayor Nancy Ellis went further. She described Charleroi’s immigrants as model neighbors — more reliable, in fact, than the town’s long-time residents. They’re first in line to pay taxes, she said. As if on cue, while we chatted multiple Haitians dutifully showed up to pay parking fines.
Most striking of all, Ms. Ellis said (and others confirmed), this year the town’s immigrants organized clean-up efforts for Charleroi’s Memorial Day celebrations: “No white people showed up.”
So the story seems to be, just like in Springfield, the town fathers -- er, parents -- chose to bring in a new proletariat to replace the old one, and the new proletariat is turning out to be better than the old deplorables. who are lazy, ungrateful, racist, drug-addled zombies.But there's another narrarive lurking in the background:
How did [the Haitians] end up in Charleroi? It is, indeed, implausible that they chose to come to the small Pennsylvania town on their own. This isn’t the result of people coming to America and ending up in a town where they know somebody.
Rather, what you discover in listening to people on the ground is that they end up in Charleroi—or countless other American cities like the high-profile case of Springfield, Ohio—because of a sophisticated operation that involves local businesses that want low-wage labor, “staffing agencies” that not only have access to migrant labor but also frequently source them housing and transportation to the job sites, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that help connect the staffing agencies with newly arrived migrants.
It is not surprising that a sophisticated sourcing ecosystem would arise to connect low-wage migrants with employers needing low-wage workers. Indeed, such a system is a necessity because America has adopted—on a bipartisan basis—what we might call the “Jobs Americans Won’t Do” theory of labor policy. The theory argues that our economy is filled with tens of millions of jobs that are inherently low productivity and, therefore, too low paying to attract Americans, necessitating the importation of a foreign workforce to do them for us.
. . ., “They say ‘we can’t find people to work.’ Well, that’s a half truth,” Andy Armbruster, a lifelong native of Charleroi said. “There’s people who would work if you paid them the going wage for the work. But they want to pay less and so they ended up getting involved with these agencies that bring in these workers.”
. . . [A] Charleroi business owner invited CBS News into his factory to see the work being done by migrant workers. Though only a few seconds of video is shown in the CBS report, the main task one sees workers doing in the video is manually moving bowls of food from one conveyor belt onto another. It’s not difficult to imagine automation playing a greater role in that process.
The piece argues that
a job traditionally done by low-wage or slave labor can be transformed by cutting-edge technological innovation at the center of 21st century great power competition.
. . . Productivity increases won’t change the nature of every low-skill job. But in a higher-wage economy with greater income to pay for low-skill services, even the service sector sees its wages go up. That’s why it was possible 50 years ago for a bartender and a maid to own their own home, raise their children in a safe neighborhood, and, ultimately, retire with dignity. Is our economy providing that same opportunity today?
Immigration policy is not just a question of economics. It has tremendous implications on our culture, our national mores, and our ability to provide dignity and basic services to our citizens. What is being done to these communities is a tragedy, and it is an avoidable one.
But there's another parallel that goes unspoken in this piece: it mentions the "staffing agencies" amd NGOs (though not the government subsidies) that move the immigrants into unlikely places in the US -- but at least in Springfield, local politicians are apparently either profiting directly by renting to the immigrants, or they're getting payoffs to enable the situation, or both. The story doesn't get that far with Charleroi, but I have at least a feeling that something's hinky, as it is in Springfield.