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MIGRATION ON THE MON  
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Kalena Thomhave
January 23, 2025
Dollars & Sense
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_ 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. _

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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.”

_Kalena Thomhave is an independent journalist and researcher on
inequality. She is based in Pittsburgh._

_Dollars & Sense is a non-profit, non-hierarchical, collectively-run
organization that publishes economic news and analysis, with the
mission of explaining essential economic concepts by placing them in
their real-world context. We publish a bi-monthly magazine, as well as
economics books that are used in college social science courses, study
groups and other educational settings._

_D&S publications question the assumptions of traditional academic
theories and empower people to think about alternatives to the
prevailing system. We cover issues that are ignored by mainstream
media and misunderstood by orthodox economic analysts. The magazine
includes regular reports on economic justice activism, primers on
economic topics, and critiques of the corporate media's coverage of
the economy._

* Pittsburgh
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* Globalization
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* deindustrialization
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* Immigration
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