Migration on the Mon
The Mon Valley, an area ravaged by deindustrialization just outside of Pittsburgh, has attracted thousands of new immigrants in recent years, a fact President-elect Donald Trump exploited in his successful campaign for the White House.
This article is from Dollars & Sense: Real World Economics, available at http://www.dollarsandsense.org
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It happened to Springfield, Ohio first. During the September presidential debate, now President-elect Donald Trump called out the nearly 60,000-person city as a hub for Haitian immigrants, claiming that the newcomers were “eating the dogs” and other pets of U.S.-born city residents. Trump inspired a sea of memes laughing at the bizarre claim, numerous articles emphasizing the fact that the accusation had no basis in reality, and most significantly, fear among the very real Haitian community in Springfield.
One week later, Trump brought up Charleroi, a small borough in western Pennsylvania, claiming—falsely—that the town’s Haitian community had brought “massive crime” with it, and that the town was “virtually bankrupt” because of resources going to Haitian immigrants. Charleroi has indeed seen new immigrants, especially Haitians, move into the area—but community leaders say Trump’s words are not merely inaccurate, but needlessly divisive and inflammatory.
“The small, 4,000-person town of Charleroi, Pennsylvania—have you heard of it?” Trump said in a September speech in Tucson, Arizona. “What a beautiful name, but it’s not so beautiful now.”
When I spoke with Joe Manning, the Charleroi borough manager, he sardonically repeated this line—what a beautiful name, but it’s not so beautiful now—in a pretty good impression of the former and future president’s breathy Queens accent.
Manning then rolled his eyes.
“I hate to be the one to break up the party,” he said, “but these people have been here for several years now.” According to Manning, the immigrant community has been a positive force for the Rust Belt town—a sentiment he has repeatedly emphasized to the numerous news outlets that interviewed him after Charleroi was thrust into the national spotlight. When Charleroi was first named by Trump, journalists from national and even international outlets flocked to Charleroi for a chance to explain a small piece of so-called “Trump country.”
Soon, Charleroi was “crawling with cameras” a local shop owner told me. She didn’t want to be named—the issue is so “controversial,” she said, and it’s a small town. Still, she stated firmly that she’d had nothing but positive interactions with immigrants—and that without them, the downtown area would be much emptier. In Charleroi, immigrants “work, pay taxes, and occupy the housing stock,” Manning said, citing the decades of empty houses and empty streets Charleroi and other Rust Belt communities experienced after deindustrialization accelerated in the 1980s.
Deindustrialization’s consequences stretch beyond isolated economic damage in individual communities. After all, when thinking of the Rust Belt, “We think first of economic loss, but that precipitated population loss,” said Maura Kay, data analyst at Fourth Economy, a community and economic development consulting firm based in Pittsburgh. “At some point, there is just a demand for people, because so many of these places were built for more than double the [number] of folks who are there now.”
The Familiar Story of Deindustrialization
Charleroi rests along the Monongahela River just 26 miles south of Pittsburgh. The town’s story is a familiar one. It could be told about any number of small U.S. towns ravaged by deindustrialization: a bustling community with a thriving Main Street is gutted by external, industrial forces, though its peak remains in living memory. Wendy Jorgensen grew up in Belle Vernon, on the other side of the Monongahela River—colloquially dubbed “the Mon”—from Charleroi. But Charleroi is “where everything happened,” she remembered. Charleroi, she said, was where you went when you needed to buy a nice dress or to get your hair done. Like many towns in western Pennsylvania, Charleroi had a strong manufacturing base, but the borough nicknamed the “Magic City” was also home to a booming retail industry.
When Jorgensen took me on a wintery tour of Charleroi, she pointed out her godmother’s house, the fancy restaurant where she had her rehearsal dinner, and the school where her mother worked for 40 years—it then served only high school students, but because of reduced enrollment, the campus is now home to students spanning kindergarten through 12th grade. Jorgensen, recently retired, doesn’t live in the Mon Valley anymore; she lives in Greensburg, a Pittsburgh suburb west of the city. I should note that I know the Jorgensens, as Wendy is a friend of my partner’s family. When I told my partner I was writing about Charleroi, he mentioned offhandedly that his best friend’s grandma (Wendy’s mother) lived near there until she died.
That’s the thing about Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania in general. It’s a place full of people who never leave—and if they do, they often find their way back. Yes, Pennsylvania steel towns have experienced years of out-migration—the “Pittsburgh diaspora” can be tracked by the presence of Steelers bars in seemingly every part of the country—but Pennsylvania still has one of the nation’s highest percentages of state residents born in the state—more than 70%. And that’s especially true in the western half.
Now that I am local to Pittsburgh, it is not surprising to me that I can easily call up someone who will wax poetic to me about the glory days of a Mon Valley borough with a population of just over 4,000.
Of course, the population of Charleroi used to be more than double that.
But in the past few years, an influx of immigration has added hundreds, maybe thousands, of new residents to the tiny town. The immigrants in Charleroi, hailing from Haiti, Vietnam, Liberia, Jamaica, and other countries, have opened businesses and spurred pedestrian traffic along Charleroi’s neglected downtown streets. Though clearly different from the town’s U.S.-born majority, the new immigrants became part of Charleroi to little fanfare.
Charleroi is “a good community,” said Getro Bernabe, who immigrated to the United States from Haiti and has lived in Charleroi for roughly five years. Bernabe serves as the community’s immigrant liaison, a position created to assist immigrants as they adapt to their new surroundings.
He acknowledged that Charleroi was “not used to diversity”—not like major, melting-pot cities such as New York City and even Pittsburgh. But as time goes on, more and more people “understand what different cultures can bring to the community.”
The new immigration to Charleroi could have been framed as a success story.
But then Donald Trump got wind of it.
Charleroi, Trump said in his September speech in Tucson, has “experienced a 2,000% increase in the population of Haitian migrants under Kamala Harris.” (This is patently false to anyone who has been to Charleroi; I can tell you that 80,000 Haitian immigrants do not live in the city.)
But the extremely inflated statistic was merely meant to motivate nationalistic voters; Trump followed up the falsehood with a call for Pennsylvanians to “remember this when you have to go to vote.”
While the economy was top of mind for voters in November, many voters also cited immigration as one of the most important issues for them in the election. So, Charleroi joined the likes of Springfield as an example of a community overrun with immigrants threatening the “great” way of life that Trump vowed to reclaim.
The Charleroi shop owner I spoke with believes that “people who think these things about the immigrants [in Charleroi] have probably never interacted with them,” describing how helpful her immigrant neighbors have been. But other, less accepting Charleroi residents have taken to a popular conservative Facebook group called the “Charleroi Rambler” to complain about immigrants in their community, sometimes spreading false propaganda. The Facebook group has been a target for anti-immigrant organizing far from Charleroi too; for example, someone posted a Ku Klux Klan flyer in the group. The FBI, Manning told me, sourced the post to a KKK splinter group in Kentucky that hadn’t been active for a few years. (“They saw a marketing opportunity,” Manning joked.)
Not long after his first mention of Charleroi, Trump brought up the borough again at a rally in Indiana, Penn., another small town in the western part of the state. “We have to get ’em out of here. It’s not sustainable,” he said, using immigration as a cudgel to argue his position on the economy. Indeed, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll, roughly three in four adults in the United States said they’d heard a politician say that immigrants are taking jobs and causing increases in unemployment.
But the claim that immigrants are responsible for American joblessness isn’t based in reality: Immigration boosts economic growth by expanding the labor force, adding jobs, fueling consumer spending, and increasing tax revenue. Moreover, unemployment for U.S.-born workers is currently at a record low.
Still, “immigrants are taking your jobs” could be an attractive argument in a place like Charleroi, where job loss has plagued the area since the 1970s. The wound is regularly ripped open, too, with factories newly closing even today.
A Fragile History
The story of Charleroi’s beginning is one of Francophone immigrants, too. In 1890, the French-speaking Walloons from Belgium helped found Charleroi—named after the Belgian glassmaking city—after bringing their glassmaking skills to the region. The mid-Mon Valley wasn’t merely flush with natural resources like bituminous coal and limestone, but also located along a river with access to the rest of the country.
In addition to the steel mills that defined southwestern Pennsylvania, large glass factories appeared in Charleroi, including a location of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company—now known as PPG Industries, the Fortune 500 company with a distinctive glass skyscraper in the Pittsburgh skyline. And besides the Belgians, the area was home to many other immigrant communities, especially Eastern Europeans.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Charleroi experienced the same decline in industry as the rest of the Greater Pittsburgh area and the Rust Belt as a whole. In 1960, the Charleroi population was just over 8,000 people. By 2000, the borough’s population had fallen by more than 40% to less than 5,000.
But shards of glassmaking remained.
Charleroi’s Macbeth-Evans Glass Company factory, which began operations at the turn of the 20th century, went through numerous corporate transformations over its century-plus history—it was first absorbed by Corning to make Pyrex glass, eventually became Corelle, and was finally purchased by Anchor Hocking in March 2024. Six months later, in September 2024, Anchor Hocking announced its plan to close the legacy plant. The news came just a week after another factory, Quality Pasta, closed its doors and laid off 100 workers.
After the closure of this last glass plant, 300 workers will lose their jobs. And for a town of roughly 4,000 people, a loss of 300 jobs is a gut punch.
Relocating to the Rust Belt
Over the past couple of decades, the Rust Belt has famously worked to renew itself (with varying levels of success) and to draw new residents to the region. In bids to reverse population decline, Rust Belt cities have tried to attract immigrants and refugees—Pittsburgh included.
Between 2014 and 2019, while Pittsburgh’s population overall fell by just over 1%, the city’s immigrant population grew by nearly 19%, staving off what could have been a more significant population decline (without immigrants, the population would have fallen 2.7%). Many of the immigrants worked in high-wage jobs like technology, though the newcomers were also roughly 22% more likely to be business owners than U.S.-born Pittsburghers, according to a 2023 report published by the American Immigration Council and the city of Pittsburgh. It wasn’t until recent years, however, that areas outside Pittsburgh became bastions of immigration.
Charleroi had been somewhat more diverse than other Pittsburgh suburbs for years—for instance, according to census data, 2.8% of the population was foreign born in 2020, compared to 1.3% in nearby Belle Vernon—but the migration of Haitians into the city was exceptional, and the growth of the community swift.
Some Haitians in Charleroi are in the United States with Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a humanitarian program similar to asylum in that beneficiaries are avoiding unsafe conditions in their home countries. Haiti originally received its TPS designation in 2010, and the status was subsequently renewed consistently until 2018, though court injunctions kept Haiti’s TPS status active until the Biden administration newly designated the country for TPS in 2021. Immigrants must have already been in the United States prior to their country’s TPS designation to receive the program’s benefits.
But the more recent arrivals have come by way of the 2023 humanitarian parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans, created for immigrants fleeing dangerous conditions in their home countries and seeking to live and work in the United States.
These programs come with asterisks. For one, they’re temporary—immigrants can benefit from humanitarian parole for two years. For two, while these programs may make it easier for some immigrants to stay in the United States, they make it easier for the government to deport people, too. As such, throughout the first year of the Biden administration, roughly 20,000 Haitians were deported, according to Human Rights Watch.
Dana Gold is the chief operating officer at Jewish Family and Community Services (JFCS), a social services organization operating in Pittsburgh that provides a wide variety of supports to families and individuals, including immigrants and refugees.
Before the rise of immigration to the Charleroi area, JFCS would sometimes head to neighboring counties to assist immigrants, but mostly the organization’s activities were focused within Pittsburgh. Gold said that the expansion of immigration to Charleroi “completely” changed JFCS’s work. “Just like people anywhere, when there’s a large group of people, there’s a large group of questions,” she said.
JFCS has case managers travel to Charleroi weekly to work with immigrants, sometimes to refer them to legal services or to help kids enroll in school, but mostly they provide help with getting and keeping jobs. The organization makes employer suggestions or connects immigrants to work, and also gives advice about the U.S. workplace.
Bernabe said the closures at the pasta and Pyrex plants affected immigrants too, forcing them to find work at other employers like Amazon, Walmart, and UPS.
But Gold explained that most new immigrants that JFCS serves start at a “survival job”—their first job in the United States—and then work their way up to jobs that can better sustain themselves and their families.
A New Company Town
It seems that many immigrants, including Haitians, are still in their survival jobs at one of the community’s largest employers, Fourth Street Foods, which has two plants in the Charleroi area. Of the 1,000 workers at the company, which makes frozen food sold in grocery stores nationwide, nearly all of the 700 assembly-line workers are immigrants.
However, most of the workers aren’t technically employees of Fourth Street Foods, but of third-party staffing agencies like Prosperity Services, which is reportedly under investigation by federal authorities for employing undocumented workers. The staffing agencies are responsible for workers’ paychecks—of which the agency takes a cut, of course. According to the president of the company, U.S.-born residents don’t want the jobs that immigrant workers end up taking. It’s true that a job at Fourth Street Foods can be grueling: workers toil in freezing temperatures—the workspace is a freezer—and complete tedious tasks, like placing bun after bun on top of frozen sandwiches on the assembly line.
The lack of U.S. workers is why, the company has said, third-party staffing agencies are necessary. Such agencies find the immigrant workers who staff the assembly lines of many food production facilities across the country, not merely those at Fourth Street Foods. And in Charleroi, since many immigrants don’t have cars, the agencies also cover workers’ transportation, busing them to the plant in the early morning.
Meanwhile, Fourth Street Foods makes sure that workers have housing. (Communities like Charleroi may seem to have a lot of available housing stock, and they often do—but some of it, which may have been empty and neglected for years in a place like cold, wet Pennsylvania, may be beyond repair.)
According to a search of Washington County property records, DB Rentals—a business of David Barbe, who is president of Fourth Street Foods—owns 33 properties in the area; Barbe owns an additional 12 properties outright.
In this way, Fourth Street Foods has created a company town of sorts, save for the fact that many of the workers are not actually Fourth Street Foods employees.
Mislaid Blame
Both Charleroi and Haiti have been fundamentally altered by the same phenomenon: globalization. The consequences of globalization have fallen on Charleroi in the form of an all-consuming deindustrialization, while Haiti has been stymied from economic development in the first place, first by long years of occupation and dictatorship, and then by globalization policies that kept the country too dependent on the Western trade regime.
When Haitians leave their struggling country—now largely controlled by paramilitary gangs—they often follow the paths trod by many other new immigrants by joining the low-wage labor force in the United States.
In the bleakness of deindustrialization, whose consequences persist decades later, some U.S.-born residents may blame immigrants for reducing wages and making the world of work worse. After all, immigrants fleeing violence may have little power to demand better working conditions, not least because they fear that speaking out will cost them their jobs.
But as sociologist Ruth Milkman argued in her book Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat, increasing immigration was “not the cause of the massive economic restructuring that began in the 1970s or of the accompanying growth of economic inequality and labor degradation; rather the influx of low-wage immigrants was a consequence of those developments.” (Emphasis in the original.)
In the late 20th century, U.S. corporations began to compete with international companies, not by focusing on innovation, research, or investment, but by outsourcing jobs, lobbying for deregulation, and attacking labor unions. According to Milkman, when U.S.-born workers rejected these degraded jobs, “many employers responded by hiring immigrants to replace them.”
The resulting resentment against immigrants, however misplaced, has been exploited and exacerbated by politicians like Trump in order to garner votes. Such tactics distract from the actors who are the ones actually offering the jobs with low pay and difficult working environments, directing anger toward immigrant workers that could be leveraged at bosses instead.
An Uncertain Future
Meanwhile, Charleroi is now a little quieter than it once was. Manning said that he sees fewer people walking on sidewalks downtown, and anecdotally, he has heard that some Haitian immigrants have left.
Manning has formed a friendship of sorts with the mayor of Springfield—they’ve kept up email correspondence as both of their towns and their Haitian communities became targets of the Trump campaign—and now, apparently, Trump’s incoming administration. He said that the Springfield mayor is working to connect with Ohio’s Republican governor to try to figure out what exactly the incoming Trump administration is planning for immigrant communities like those in Springfield and Charleroi—and if the threats of mass deportations and TPS revocation will come to pass.
“I just don’t know,” Manning sighed, the question of what might happen—not just to the Haitians in Charleroi, but to the community’s diverse mix of immigrants from West Africa, Asia, and Latin America—hanging in the air.
Last summer, the immigrant community joined Charleroi’s Fourth of July celebration. Manning described how immigrants set up food booths, selling Haitian food as well as other Caribbean and West African food. Haitian musical groups performed. And immigrants participated in a community walk through town, each of them carrying an American flag. “It’s part of the integration,” Bernabe said, recalling the celebration. “To be part of the American culture.”
The immigrants, Manning said, don’t merely benefit Charleroi because they pay taxes and work; they’re “members of the community” giving Charleroi “those intangible things that [make a community] a better place to live.” He paused, thoughtful.
“I think that’s the fear now,” Manning said. “That if [Charleroi’s immigrants] get scared off—or rounded up and deported—that the town’s going to go back to being an empty shell of what it used to be.”
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