How Charleroi, PA lost its community identity

 

City Journal has published an in-depth report on how thousands of Haitian migrants ended up in the little town of Charleroi, Pennsylvania.  It wasn't by accident.  Here's an excerpt.

The best way to understand the migrant crisis is to follow the flow of people, money, and power—in other words, to trace the supply chain of human migration. In Charleroi, we have mapped the web of institutions that have facilitated the flow of migrants from Port-au-Prince. Some of these institutions are public and, as such, must make their records available; others, to avoid scrutiny, keep a low profile.

The initial, and most powerful, institution is the federal government. Over the past four years, Customs and Border Patrol has reported hundreds of thousands of encounters with Haitian nationals. In addition, the White House has admitted more than 210,000 Haitians through its controversial Humanitarian Parole Program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV), which it paused in early August and has since relaunched. The program is presented as a “lawful pathway,” but critics, such as vice presidential candidate J. D. Vance, have called it an “abuse of asylum laws” and warned of its destabilizing effects on communities across the country.

The next link in the web is the network of publicly funded NGOs that provide migrants with resources to assist in travel, housing, income, and work. These groups are called “national resettlement agencies,” and serve as the key middleman in the flow of migration. The scale of this effort is astounding. These agencies are affiliated with more than 340 local offices nationwide and have received some $5.5 billion in new awards since 2021. And, because they are technically non-governmental institutions, they are not required to disclose detailed information about their operations.

. . .

What is next in the chain? Business. In Charleroi, the Haitians are, above all, a new supply of inexpensive labor. A network of staffing agencies and private companies has recruited the migrants to the city’s factories and assembly lines. While some recruitment happens through word-of-mouth, many staffing agencies partner with local nonprofits that specialize in refugee resettlement to find immigrants who need work.

At the center of this system in Charleroi is Fourth Street Foods, a frozen-food supplier with approximately 1,000 employees, most of whom work on the assembly line. In an exclusive interview, Chris Scott, the CEO and COO of Fourth Street Barbeque (the legal name of the firm that does business as Fourth Street Foods) explained that his company, like many factory businesses, has long relied on immigrant labor, which, he estimates, makes up about 70 percent of its workforce. The firm employs many temporary workers, and, with the arrival of the Haitians, has found a new group of laborers willing to work long days in an industrial freezer, starting at about $12 an hour.

Many of these workers are not directly employed by Fourth Street Foods. Instead, according to Scott, they are hired through staffing agencies, which pay workers about $12 an hour for entry-level food-processing roles and bill Fourth Street Foods over $16 per hour to cover their costs, including transportation and overhead. (The average wage for an entry-level food processor in Washington County was $16.42 per hour in 2023.)

. . .

The final link is housing. And here, too, Fourth Street Foods has an organized interest. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Scott said, Fourth Street Foods was “scrambling” to find additional workers. The owner of the company, David Barbe, stepped in, acquiring and renovating a “significant number of homes” to provide housing for his workforce. A property search for David Barbe and his other business, DB Rentals LLC, shows records of more than 50 properties, many of which are concentrated on the same streets.

After the initial purchases, Barbe required some of the existing residents to vacate to make room for newcomers. A single father, who spoke on condition of anonymity, was forced to leave his home after it was sold to DB Rentals LLC in 2021. “[W]e had to move out [on] very short notice after five years of living there and being great tenants,” he explained. Afterward, a neighbor informed him that a dozen people of Asian descent had been crammed into the two-bedroom home. They were “getting picked up and dropped off in vans.”

“My kids were super upset because that was the house they grew up in since they were little,” the man said. “It was just all a huge nightmare.”

There's more at the link.

The most troubling thing about this network of influence and mutual profit is that our taxpayer dollars are subsidizing just about all of it.  From the federal government's programs to "import" hundreds of thousands of Haitians (including flying many of them to the USA, and admitting the rest at the southern border), to the subsidies granted to the migrants, to the NGO's (many paid lavishly by the federal government under various grant programs), to the agencies providing labor to companies and raking off a fat percentage of the migrants' income . . . it's all a giant money-making machine, and the details are hidden from all of us.  How many billions of taxpayer dollars have gone into the mess in Charleroi?  Nobody knows.  Will we ever know?  Not if the powers that be continue to be.  It's in their interests to keep the real figures as secret as possible.

I'd love someone to calculate precisely how much the Biden administration has committed in these various ways to all the migrants who've poured into this country since it took office.  I'm willing to bet that billions are no longer enough to count all the costs, subsidies and kickbacks.  I reckon it's very likely to be in the trillions by now.  Precisely how much of that money has been kicked back to politicians and others with influence, we'll almost certainly never find out.

Peter