There’s one thing Kristin Hopkins Karczek is most proud of about her community. That’s because her city is now one of the few boroughs in Pennsylvania with a growing population.
“We haven’t invested in this borough for a long time,” says Charleroi. “And now we are finally able to invest, because we see a need.”
Surrounded by decommissioned power plants, railroad tracks, and steel mills, Charleroi in southwestern Pennsylvania was once the epitome of America’s Rust Belt. For decades, factories in this and surrounding areas closed, people moved away, and the population declined by about 60%.
But in recent years, immigrants have flocked to the town of 4,200 people in search of high-paying jobs and cheap housing. For the first time in a century, more people are choosing to make this quiet community on the banks of the Monongahela their home rather than evacuating it, according to the 2020 Census.
When Rodney Michel arrived in Charleroi four years ago, his first job was working on a line at a food manufacturing company, before taking a similarly demanding job at an Amazon factory in a nearby town. Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, he saw his community growing in Charleroi and decided to convert an old vacant storefront on Fallowfield Street into a Caribbean restaurant to serve the city’s growing immigrant community. My day job is to provide.
“Sometimes I work 12 hours a day,” he said inside Global Food Mart, a Caribbean grocery store where shoppers play arcade games and rummage through boxes of tropical fruit.
“This is a first for our community and we are proud of it.”
But while locals like Michel and Hopkins-Karczek see Charleroi in the midst of a revitalization, others are seeking to politicize the town’s immigrant community. It propelled the small community into the national spotlight in America’s bitterly contested and divisive 2024 election.
Last month, Donald Trump sought to make immigration a cornerstone of his election campaign, falsely claiming that Charleroi was “virtually bankrupt” and suffering “massive crime” due to the presence of immigrants.
Like neighboring Springfield, Ohio, where there were bomb threats and neo-Nazi marches in the wake of President Trump’s false claims that immigrants are eating people’s pets, Charleroi has recruitment pamphlets posted on local Facebook groups. A gathering of right-wing YouTubers and KKK groups who post.
The former president’s comments have also found support among local residents.
“When coronavirus was here, people lost their jobs, but these people were allowed to enter the country.” [to America]. That tells you something was going on there,” says John Horner, who works part-time as a clock repairman on Fallowfield Avenue. There, craft stores, vacant storefronts, and thrift stores displaying MAGA shirts are interspersed with grocery stores serving the local Caribbean community. .
“On a personal level, I’m concerned about people coming across the border. I couldn’t stand that.”
Horner said he has “mixed feelings” about the overall incarceration of people fleeing war and poverty in the United States.
“They open their own shops and buy out their own people. Many of them are not here for war, but for connections – they heard from others [about Charleroi]” he says.
All this is happening at a time of significant uncertainty for Charleroi.
According to local media reports, federal investigators believe the employment agency employs illegal immigrants in and around Charleroi and pays them in cash.
Last month, it was announced that a glass factory in Charleroi that employs about 300 people would be moving operations 170 miles (274 kilometers) west to Ohio, sending shockwaves through the community. The town’s poverty rate is 25%, more than double the rate for Pennsylvania as a whole.
This allowed President Trump to expand into his hometown. In the 2020 presidential election, more than 60% of voters in Washington County, Charleroi supported Trump.
Nationally, immigration has become a central campaign issue in recent months, despite a significant drop in the number of migrant encounters recorded by Border Patrol at the U.S. southern border. The number of encounters in August was 58,038, a fraction of the number during the Trump administration, which reached 132,856 in May 2019. Of the people encountered at the border last August, only 46 were Haitian nationals.
Research shows that Haitians and other people legally in the United States with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) play a critical role in the nation’s critical infrastructure. An analysis of federal data by the American Progress Center, a progressive think tank, shows that more than 131,000 immigrants in TPS have worked in critical occupations such as health care and food processing during the COVID-19 pandemic. It turned out that there was.
But back in Charleroi, local leaders moved quickly to support the growing number of immigrants.
In 2022, a Neighborhood Partnerships Program was established, partially paid for by local businesses that rely on immigrant labor, to provide services to support the integration of immigrant communities.
Two years ago, the city of Charleroi created a community liaison position to be filled by a Haitian person to help immigrants enroll in English classes, register children in schools, and set up health screening sites at local libraries. . The borough is home to a large Haitian community as well as more than 1,000 immigrants from Liberia, Jamaica, and other countries.
“Business owners in town are thrilled with the influx of foot traffic and the revitalization of downtown,” Hopkins Karczek said. “It has been a long time since an investment was made in Charleroi.”
Michel said he had never had any negative contact during his stay in Charleroi, and that he and other migrants had witnessed the efforts of local authorities.
“In Haiti, the government doesn’t care about its people the way it does here,” he says.
Horner acknowledged that Haitian immigrants are a positive thing for the town, despite the anxiety he hears about what’s happening on the U.S.-Mexico border thousands of miles away.
“They often come here looking for cheap clothes and other things,” he says.
“As a businessman, [immigrants] Good for business. Capitalism is a good thing. No problem. I have no complaints. ”
