“America doesn’t need this place, doesn’t care about this place… It’s just a place that time forgot.” Tom Altmiller is sitting across from me at a paint-chipped picnic table. It looks like it was bright red once, but the years have faded it to a sort of grayish maroon. He’s in his late 50s, with square glasses, a graying goatee, and a short ponytail, and speaks with a stubborn, matter-of-fact stoicism that’s common among the locals. “My standard joke about this place is that if the world ended tomorrow, we’d get ten more years, because we’re roughly that far behind the curve here,” he says. “In terms of everything.”
Things in Charleroi — a town of just over 4,000, nestled in southwestern Pennsylvania’s Mon Valley — have been bad for so long that the badness is taken for granted. Pessimism underpins their humor, their turns of phrase, and the way they tell stories. They are not a dour people: by and large, they’re warm and friendly. But they were born into decline. It colors every corner of their lives — a generational darkness, passed from father to son.
More than once, walking the streets here, I’m reminded of Charles Bukowski’s poem Dinosauria, We:
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Situated about 30 miles from Pittsburgh, Charleroi is a poor, primarily white working-class community where less than 18 percent of the residents have a bachelor’s degree, and the median household income is $45,000 a year. The town was once a flourishing community nicknamed the “Magic City” with an economy fed by the region’s booming steel industry, and a glass-making plant based in Charleroi itself — a creation of the Belgian immigrants who settled in the area towards the end of the 19th-century and named the town after its sister city of Charleroi, Belgium, then the glass-making capital of Europe. It was even home to one of America’s first movie theaters: The Electric Theater, opened in 1905. It was always a blue-collar place, but as late as the 1990s it was still a picturesque slice of small-town America, the kind of place painted by Norman Rockwell.
But the Electric Theater is long gone — and so is the steel. As the industry withered and died in the 1980s, Charleroi entered into steep decline. Today, the town is plagued by many of the same problems afflicting deindustrialized communities across the country, chief among them poverty, addiction, and despair. It wouldn’t be fair to call it a “ghost town” yet, and the locals would be insulted if you did. But the main drag is filled with abandoned storefronts. Most of the former business owners didn’t even bother to take down their signs after they closed up shop, so they hang there accumulating dust, like skeletons taunting the living from beyond the grave.
The mayor and the borough council are currently locked in a bitter struggle to prevent Anchor Hocking, the last major glass plant, from closing up shop and leaving for good — a move that the company, which has been a staple of the town for generations, announced in early September. The mayor, a gruff but friendly middle-aged man named Gregg Doerfler, tells me he’s an optimist — that he wouldn’t be entering this fight if he didn’t think they had a chance. Then again, he doesn’t have much of a choice. Hope is the last thing Charleroi has left.
The people in Charleroi are hardy. But they are the forgotten Americans. “We’ve always just — fight, survive, make it happen,” Ernie, a truck driver, tells me. “Find a way to make it happen. There’s a lot of fighting people around here. And it takes a lot for people to quit. But it’s happening. Whenever you see the natives from this area in particular going somewhere else – it’s bad.” Ernie wasn’t just talking about the economy, which has been in a depression for decades, but something bigger — and darker — than deindustrialization and decline.
Beginning around 2021, Charleroi began to be flooded by thousands of immigrants, largely, (though not exclusively) from Haiti. A local CBS report from March reported that “the immigrant population in Charleroi has grown by more than 2,000% in the last two years.” Earlier this month, PolitiFact admitted that the number of non-English speaking students in the Charleroi school district had skyrocketed by an unbelievable 1,800 percent over the past five years.
Two weeks ago, my organization America 2100 spent five days on the ground in Charleroi, documenting and reporting on the crisis. Our coverage went viral, and within 48 hours of our first public interview, President Trump mentioned Charleroi at a rally. Then again, one week and a half later, this time at some length, during a rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania. That kicked off a media feeding frenzy, replete with a flood of authoritative “fact checks” and reports on Trump’s “debunked claims” about the Pennsylvania town, an NBC News segment, a cacophony of garment-rending legacy media write-ups about “hateful rants”, “dangerous conspiracy theories,” “anti-immigrant lies”, and a statement from Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro slamming Trump’s criticism as “complete and utter bullshit.”
As one might expect, the story that emerged from our interviews with dozens of locals was markedly different than the one advanced by the press. The public services in Charleroi are overwhelmed. The already-overextended budget can’t keep up with the new arrivals. Housing complexes, some of which have packed as many as 15 to 20 Haitians into one unit, are affected by serial hygiene issues including cockroach and bed bug infestations. The schools are swamped: “The district has already had to hire more [English Language Learning] teachers, an ELL coach for the teachers and an interpreter that cost over $400,000,” CBS Pittsburgh reported. “And with the growth expected to continue, the district projects spending another $300,000 next school year.” Parents told us that the native students aren’t advancing, because all of the system’s resources have been diverted to deal with the new arrivals. Tom Altmiller eventually opted to pull his son out of school, and homeschool him on his own. But this is a town where people punch clocks to begin their shift. Most parents don’t have that luxury.
As in Springfield, Ohio, there’s also been a sharp uptick in car crashes in Charleroi. (“I have never seen a town respond to so many of these calls,” the Charleroi Fire Chief told a local paper back in August). Nobody’s quite sure how the Haitians are getting driver licenses, nor how they’re able to afford the flashy new cars some of them now drive through the town, but everyone we spoke to, including the more sympathetic voices, said (in so many words) that they appeared to have little to no interest in obeying the town’s traffic laws and speed limit.
All of this is contributing to a simmering tension, lurking beneath the surface of the town. Many of the immigrants don’t speak English. They stare — you can feel their eyes following you as you walk through the main strip of town. They host their own parties, organize their own events (including Haitian Flag Day), and frequent their own businesses. They’re constantly on their phones, talking to friends and family back home. “Assimilation” — a word with almost mystical properties in U.S. immigration debates — is not happening.
“What I’ve seen in the last five years since the influx has started is: they have no interest in our culture,” Altmiller told me. “They brought their culture here. If you go look at the main drag of town here, you’ll see: They have their groceries, and they have their storefronts, and you know, the message is fairly clear — and that is, ‘this is for us.’ Okay, message received. People understand.”
There’s an additional factor contributing to suspicion in Charleroi: none of the natives know how the migrants are getting there. The streets of the town are now busy with dozens of vans — marked with the logos of shadowy “staffing companies,” without websites and registered to dilapidated properties in town — primarily transporting Haitian migrants.
According to Steven Cropelli, who works as a paramedic in Charleroi, the past three years have seen “a population increase [of] probably 30-40 percent,” with “Haitians coming in and just going in and out of different houses and having vans pick them up to wherever they’re going to, and then returning them at all hours of the night.” I asked him if he had any idea where these vans were coming from. “No.”
As IM—1776’s Benjamin Roberts demonstrated in his excellent report from Springfield, mass immigration in America is driven by a triad of federal government programs, a well-funded NGO-industrial complex, and big business interests looking for cheap labor. In Charleroi, the most significant aspect is big business. Employers like Fourth Street Foods, a food-packaging plant with two major locations, in Charleroi and its neighboring town of Speers, source workers from the staffing companies that cover the logistics of transporting the immigrants. The owner of Fourth Street Foods, Dave Barbe, has purchased many of the houses in Charleroi, converting them into rentals to house the new workers. In effect, it’s a coordinated effort to convert Charleroi into a gigantic workers’ barracks — a company town.
Michael Needham, my colleague at America 2100, detailed this dynamic in a recent piece for American Compass:
“What you discover in listening to people on the ground is that [the immigrants] 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.”
Following heightened attention on Charleroi, that line is exactly what Dave Barbe has resorted to. (“Charleroi, Pennsylvania, business owner says immigrant population works jobs Americans do not want,” declared a recent local CBS report on Fourth Street Foods). The argument invariably cuts off the second part of the sentence: Immigrants are working jobs that Americans don’t want at that wage. If businesses paid American wages rather than Third World ones, it would be a different story.
But that would require that business leaders cared more about their country than their bottom line. In Charleroi — and towns like it across the country — I wouldn’t hold my breath. “They said, ‘We can’t find people to work,’” Andy, a delivery driver and lifetime native of Charleroi, told me. “Well, that’s a half-truth. There are people that would work if you paid them, you know, the going wage for the work. But they wanted to pay less… So they bring in the people from Third World countries who will do that work for poverty wages. And they think it’s a great deal. And it probably is a good deal for them.”
“But not for the natives?” I asked.
Andy laughed. “No.”
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