Two Views on Charleroi
Driving 30 miles south from Pittsburgh and entering the old mill town of Charleroi you think the place is totally deserted. Most of the shops in Main Street are boarded up. There is hardly anybody around. The traffic lights along the dozen blocks of the town are dangling uselessly in the wind with hardly any traffic flowing. The day before I arrived the local newspaper reported the “Final whistle at the Corelle plant”, the closure of one of the last factories in the once proud city “after 132 years of glassmaking”. Another few hundred jobs lost. And another small chapter in this 50-year-long decline of the American Rust Belt ending. Yet, the news the city recently made has been all about invading Haitians.
It was, of course, Donald Trump, who brought it up during his election campaign last September. About Charleroi he said at a rally in Arizona: “What a beautiful name, but it’s not so beautiful now. It has experienced a 2.000 percent increase in the population of Haitian migrants under Kamala Harris…This flood of illegal aliens is bringing massive crime to the town and every place near it”. For Trump this was only the sequel to his invented story about the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio, eating cats and dogs. For Charleroi this was another blow below the belt.
The thing behind Trump’s inflammatory statement is the fact that about 2.000 Haitians had arrived in Charleroi over the last few years in the search for low-paying jobs and cheap housing. Walking down Main Street you can see how they have rehabilitated some of the empty buildings selling groceries and their wares. There is Queen’s Market between a remaining nail shop and Chang Fat Mini Market, and there is ria money transfer right opposite the Charleroi Fire Department. In short, the incoming immigrants have lifted a population that had halved from 8.100 people in 1960. Not every citizen of Charleroi agrees that this is a good thing.
“Charleroi was the Magic City” reminisces Chris, who is just about leaving the local library in his pickup. In his 35-years with the police force he has patrolled the centre of town during the 70s. On Saturday nights all bars, restaurants and four movie theatres were full of people until the early hours. He also remembers fondly the boats travelling up the Monogahela River and docking at the other end of town to unload the coal which used to fuel the steel mills in the vicinity.
During his last years before retirement Chris has seen the “good military discipline” at police force go; and “Generation X, or what you call it, only coming in for the money and good life”. Times have changed. Now in his early 70s Chris is watching those changes with concern – and not only by watching right-wing TV. He shows me his varied news sources on his cell phone, from National Network Channels to the local Mon Valley Independent.
Yet still, certain questionable stories stuck with him, like “whites being refused entry into an immigrant-owned grocery store”. As the reporter of the “New Yorker” magazine had already debunked this story last September, it was a misunderstanding or a wilful exaggeration. There never was such a sign refusing entry, but white citizens had taken offense at “Queen’s” grocery store for only advertising food from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean while omitting American food. According to the “New Yorker” the owner made good for her lapsus by displaying a Trump election poster behind the counter.
And then Chris comes up with the story that the owner of Fourth Streets Barbeque hired Haitians illegally and drove them back and forth to work in his restaurants. And he links this rumour to his suspicion that the new and very costly set of traffic lights might have been “financed by Borough officials and local politicians through taking a cut from letting the Haitians in”. Quite a conspiracy theory that is, but it has obviously been circulating around town. “I don’t mind them being here", says Chris before he gets into his pickup truck and leaves for his home outside of town, “but we are not a sanctuary city”. The 62.2 % of Trump-voters in Washington County would probably agree with his views.
On to Adriana in the ria money transfer shop. She is Mexican, her father came to the US in 1985, first working on the fields in Florida before moving to Pittsburgh and opening a restaurant there. Adriana and her husband have six kids, some of them graduated already, the youngest one lounges with his cell phone next to his mother behind the counter.
Her family came here, explains Adriana “because Charleroi is cheaper than Pittsburgh and has less crime and addiction”. For Adriana the stories about Haitian crime in Charleroi are all untrue, peddled by people “who just don’t like us. I know how Haitians live; I am married to one”. In her business she can see how hard immigrants work sending money home all the time and she must ask them for valid visa and or residence permits before they can transfer funds.
She is talking about people like Exilien who has only recently arrived from Haiti and who, waiting for his transfer, is holding on to his fresh visa application since his working permit is running out by the end of this month. The lankly 30-year-old is happy to be working at a barbeque restaurant but speaks hardly any English. He looks hopelessly hopeful that they will process his application in time. But it is not clear if Exilien really knows about the danger he is in from the recent Executive Order by Donald Trump, which has already caused a first raid against Haitians in Charleroi by the increasingly ruthless agency for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It is also not clear how many Haitians the ICE unit has taken away and what is happening to them. But this the kind of action which Chris is in favour and Adrianna in fear of.
In Main Street, which is correctly called Fallowfield Avenue, I also meet Linda, who does not want to give her real name because she works in education. Asked if she supported Donald Trump and his immigration policy she spurts out: “Yes, Trump is an idiot, but I voted for him”. And why? “Because we can’t keep giving away all this money, writing all those cheques”. But which money does she mean, the money for the defence of Europe or for Medicare? Here she does not want to be specific. “Things just couldn’t go on that way”. Do her neighbours think the same? She and her husband just don’t talk to their neighbours any longer about politics. “It is all a big mess”.