Editorial: Anti-immigrant lies won't save Charleroi, but immigrants might

It was always a given that dehumanizing rhetoric around immigration would intensify as the presidential election approached. Unfortunately, in the turn to dangerous lies about established communities of immigrants in American towns, it has gotten much worse — and, in Western Pennsylvania, closer to home — than even most cynics expected.

Lies about Haitian immigrant communities in Springfield, Ohio, and Charleroi, Pennsylvania, are helping nobody, and hurting everybody. They are exacerbating the usual but manageable tensions in changing communities and hurting the cause of integration. In so doing, they are holding back American towns that have been held back for too long, and which are now experiencing a burst of life and hope from hard-working immigrants fleeing a devastated society.

In fact, in Charleroi in particular, the overheated and deceptive rhetoric about immigrants has overshadowed a far more important disruption for the town: the looming closure of the glass factory that has given the town its identity for over a century, and provides over 300 jobs.

Instead, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, along with allied social media accounts, has seized on an influx of immigrants, largely from the embattled Caribbean nation of Haiti, as a grave threat to the community. Estimates vary, but in recent years somewhere between several hundred and 2,000 Haitians have settled in the Mon Valley borough, whose 2020 population of about 4,000 represents a roughly 65% decline from its peak a century ago.

The allegation is that the Biden administration is conniving with shadowy business interests to intentionally swamp Charleroi with immigrants, either (at best) heedless of the disruption this causes the community or (at worst, in a nod to the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory) for the direct purpose of displacing native-born Americans. This has been made even more dramatic by baseless suggestions that waves of thefts of pets have followed Haitian migration.

The reality is much more prosaic. As the area's Republican state senator, Camera Bartolotta, explained on social media, a local business owner had struggled to find workers in the Mon Valley, and so hired a firm who recruited and vetted legal immigrants. This began a chain of migration from Haiti to Charleroi. While there have been tensions, as there are in any community when newcomers arrive with different appearances and languages and habits, they have been manageable. Charleroi is not being destroyed.

An increase in population of 1,000 to 2,000 would bring Charleroi to population figures not seen since the 1980s, which represents a challenge to city services that are accustomed to decline — but also a turnaround no one expected, and which would never have happened without immigrants filling job openings and starting businesses of their own.

Meanwhile, for defending Charleroi as a whole — that is, both its native-born and immigrant populations — from cruel and deceptive attacks, Ms. Bartolotta has attracted the ire of major Trump-aligned social media accounts, which are threatening her political future.

Charleroi's recovery is jeopardized not by immigration, but by the closure of the glass plant that has sustained Charleroi for a century. Known for producing Pyrex kitchenware, the plant is now, through a complicated series of acquisitions, controlled by a private equity firm. This is a clear case of modern economic systems working against small-town America — and this is where political attention should be paid.

But it's much easier to scapegoat immigrants, even though it will help no one.