In many ways, Charleroi seemed like a perfect backdrop for the issues that Donald Trump has made the centerpiece of his campaign. And it was thrust into the national spotlight last month when Trump denounced the hundreds of Haitian migrants who had recently settled there.
“Crime is rampant,” he said during a Sept. 23 rally in Indiana County — although local police leaders had been saying otherwise. “The jobs are taken by migrants, illegally imported to our countries.”
Charleroi was reeling from another trend that Trump decries: a long, painful history of deindustrialization. Locals had just learned that its history glass factory — one of the few remaining in a region that once dominated the glass-making industry — would close by the end of the year.
The plant, owned by Corelle Brands, employs 300 people and makes the popular Pyrex cookware — which has been made in Charleroi since before World War II. Daniel Byrne is one of the many employees whose family history goes back nearly that long: Her grandfather worked there, and it’s where she met her husband.
“If this takes place, it'll devastate the town,” said Byrne.
Trump typically blames such hardship on two major factors: jobs being shipped overseas, and immigrants flooding in from across the border. But in this case, the plant’s jobs are headed to Ohio, not overseas. And without immigrants, it’s hard to say what Charleroi’s history, or future, would be.
Anne Madarasz, the chief curator of the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, featured glass pieces from Charleroi in a museum exhibit about the industry. She said the products were “fine enough for the presidents in the White House,” but also included “Depression-era” dinner plates and cups
“What they advertised was they made a quality glass at a quantity price,” Madarasz said.
By 1920, 80% of the glass in the country was made in the greater Pittsburgh region, and Madarasz said those factories attracted skilled glass-makers from Belgium and Germany and later less skilled workers from Eastern Europe. The 1920s was the decade when Charleroi’s population peaked at more than 11,000. A century later, there were around 4,000.
Today the community’s biggest employer also relies on immigrants: Fourth Street Barbecue, a food manufacturer that makes frozen food items like breakfast sandwiches and breakfast bowls.
“Our company feeds millions of people every day,” said Chris Scott, the company CEO. “We do it in a way that food is high quality, but it's at a lower cost. So we'll do everything we can do to retain that.”
Immigrants have been a key part of that plan – at least until now.
'Everybody is scrambling'
To keep costs down, Scott said, companies like Fourth Street tend to hire a lot of foreign workers. He said it's been true in every frozen food factory he's worked for over the course of than three decades. And recently that's meant hiring Haitian immigrants in Charleroi — dozens of whom were, on a recent day, doing things like putting finished breakfast bowls into boxes and stacking meat and eggs onto croissants.
Chris Briem, a regional economist at the University of Pittsburgh, said Charleroi is a rare exception to the fact that, in recent decades, the Pittsburgh area hasn't attracted a lot of low-skilled immigrants. When the steel industry crashed, he said, many young people left. But many others stayed, creating a glut of older workers.
“So all the jobs that you would have been pulling immigrants here for the last couple of decades, we had this overhang of older workers,” he said.
But that has changed, Briem said, with unemployment rates dipping below 4% this year, a rate not seen for more than 50 years.
“No local employer has any memory or history or experience with trying to hire workers in such an environment where our unemployment rate is so low,” he said.
That was the dilemma facing Fourth Street owner Dave Barbe in the middle of the pandemic. Fourth Street works with a variety of brands as a subcontractor to put frozen food on the shelves of grocery stores like Walmart and Aldi. And those brands could not get enough product during the pandemic. Barbe wanted to hire nearly a thousand workers to keep up with rising demand.
But Charleroi and most of the towns nearby have been losing population for decades. Hiring a single mechanic was a challenge, Barbe said: “We offer $30 an hour and we offered a $1,000 signing bonus. And I had one applicant, I had two actually. The other guy didn't show up for the interview. I believe we hired him and he's still with us. But everybody is scrambling” to find workers.
Barbe said he reached out to other food companies who told him about staffing agencies. And with the help of those agencies Barbe started to quickly ramp up the number of immigrants working at his factories.
Perhaps ironically, the first wave of those immigrants — many of whom were Liberians — arrived thanks to Donald Trump. When he was president, Trump created a special program for Liberians that gave them a path to citizenship in 2019--the year that Barbe took over production at the company's two plants.
Joseph Patrick Murphy is an immigration lawyer in Pittsburgh.He said that in 2019 he started getting so many requests for legal help from Charleroi, he started traveling to the town every Sunday. He eventually found an office and put up an LED sign that said in Spanish, English and Creole: “President Biden wants to help you get legal.”
But by 2022, Murphy noticed a change in his clientele. Many of the immigrants asking for help were now Haitian. Haiti's president had been assassinated the year before touching off widespread violence, and thousands of Haitians had begun making their way across the U.S. border. At first Murphy helped them apply for asylum but later that year, the Biden administration offered many Haitians temporary protected status, which would allow them to stay in the country and work.
That made Haitian migrants very attractive to a place like Fourth Street. “You can quickly get them legal and quickly get them work permits, and they were able to get them. So that's what made them so desirable,” Murphy said.
The Haitian population in Charleroi “exploded,” Murphy said. And for the most part, Charleroi handled it well, he said. School officials held meetings with state leaders and town leaders welcomed the immigrants, he said. When Murphy set up a similar office in Oklahoma, by contrast, it was riddled with bullets by someone who apparently didn't think favorably of immigrants.
“I don't really put up an office in some small town that says ‘Immigration Here.’ But we were able to do it in Charleroi,” he said.
That is, until Trump put Charleroi in this election's political crosshairs.
'When are they going home?'
Murphy recently stopped posting on his company's social media pages because he received threats with details about his home and family. Angry residents started approaching him at McDonald's where he was meeting with clients.
“You don't know what kind of state of mind these people are in or what kind of propaganda they're crazed by,” he said. “But first thing out of their mouth was, ’When are they going home?’”
Murphy has been attacked by supporters of the Haitians as well. At a recent borough council meeting, Kristin Hopkins-Calcek, a Democrat, criticized Murphy for saying that many of his Haitian clients had entered the country illegally.
“I don't want someone to come up here and say, ‘Hey, you know, I think probably there's a lot of illegals here.’ How can you just say that?” she said. “That stirs feelings of hate.”
Murphy said that his clients were all now at least on the path to obtaining formal status.
Barbe has lived in Charleroi his entire life. In the last few weeks he has faced attacks from residents who say he's ruined the town by hiring so many immigrant workers.
“I'm still in pretty good shape for a 71-year-old guy. But it's not my intent to fight anybody. But what are you going to do?” he said. “You can’t explain to them in that amount of time, everything you think you're doing right and you really have to take it on the chin.”
One of the staffing agencies that has supplied workers for Barbe, Prosperity Services, has recently faced scrutiny from federal investigators over allegations that they were helping immigrants without legal status to work at the factory, according to WTAE. Barbe said the company has hired a firm to audit the staffing agencies who supply workers at the factory.
“As of today, I have 700 workers,” he said. “And I'm not saying somebody might slip through the cracks, but I have documentation from the auditing agencies that everybody that's here is vetted to work and they're legally able to work.”
But during a recent interview Trump threatened to remove Haitian immigrants if he's elected. And the company is beginning to make contingency plans in case that happens.
“We're very familiar with [Trump’s] comments and we've actually met internally as we think our way through if that were to occur, what the timing would be and what kind of changes we'd have to make in preparation for that,” Scott, the CEO said.
The Haitians’ current protected status expires in 2026 and Murphy said Trump would face serious legal challenges if he tried to cancel their status early. If Trump follows through, Murphy said many Haitians would likely apply for asylum, a process so backed up that it can take more than four years just to get a hearing. In the meantime, he said, they would likely be able to continue working.
But some of the Haitians in town have also become worried about their safety and future legal status. Absenteeism has increased: About 20 workers per day have stopped showing up for their shifts at Fourth Street. Briem, the economist, said that, although unemployment is low in the Pittsburgh region, it’s also low just about everywhere else. And many of these Haitians could find work elsewhere.
And that may happen, according to Pierre Richard Momplaisir, who moved to Charleroi from Haiti in 2019 and who drives a forklift for Fourth Street. He believes that Haitians will want to move to places with more amenities than Charleroi. Right now it takes a long time just to drive to the mall, he said.
“Once they get money where they can buy a car, they just leave to live in the big towns like New York City,” he said.
Joe Manning, the manager of Charleroi, said he’s already noticed fewer people walking the streets. “It's kind of eerie, kind of creepy because you go out here and there's like nobody around where they used to be,” he said.
Meanwhile the glass plant in Charleroi announced it was going to begin layoffs in December, despite some last-ditch efforts by politicians to try to save it.
Not everyone’s been happy that so much attention has focused on the Haitians rather than the glass plant. Kevin Heubner is one of the people who will lose his job when the plant closes.
“The Haitian issue, I don't believe, is really an issue,” he said. “Yes, there's a lot of them, but they're not causing any problems as far as we know.”
