A Constructed Crisis in Charleroi

“If you showed people in Haiti a map of the United States, the likelihood that they’d put their finger on Charleroi, PA and decide to come here is close to zero.” It’s a good point made to my America 2100 colleagues by a local resident of Charleroi, Tom Altmiller, during their week-long on-the-ground investigation of the impact immigration is having there and across middle America.

Charleroi, a small town of 4,000 people, is located about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh. A case study in the deindustrialization of the Midwest, Charleroi was once a booming town founded by Belgium glassworkers featuring glass factories, access to nearby jobs with Pittsburgh Steel, and even one of America’s first movie theaters—Electric Theater, which opened in 1905.

Charleroi has been in decline for years and experiences all of the challenges of job losses and drug overdoses that have become all too familiar in towns laid low by deindustrialization.

Then, just a few years ago, something changed. Thousands of Haitian migrants arrived in Charleroi. Most of these Haitians are not in the United States illegally. They are here under a program called CHNV Parole, which allows up to 30,000 nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to apply per month for humanitarian parole into the United States.

But back to Tom’s question: How did they end up in Charleroi? It is, indeed, implausible that they chose to come to the small Pennsylvania town on their own. This isn’t the result of people coming to America and ending up in a town where they know somebody.

Rather, what you discover in listening to people on the ground is that they end up in Charleroi—or countless other American cities like the high-profile case of Springfield, Ohio—because of a sophisticated operation that involves local businesses that want low-wage labor, “staffing agencies” that not only have access to migrant labor but also frequently source them housing and transportation to the job sites, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that help connect the staffing agencies with newly arrived migrants.

It is not surprising that a sophisticated sourcing ecosystem would arise to connect low-wage migrants with employers needing low-wage workers. Indeed, such a system is a necessity because America has adopted—on a bipartisan basis—what we might call the “Jobs Americans Won’t Do” theory of labor policy. The theory argues that our economy is filled with tens of millions of jobs that are inherently low productivity and, therefore, too low paying to attract Americans, necessitating the importation of a foreign workforce to do them for us.

Few of our nation’s policymakers question this assumption. Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, speaking recently on the Ezra Klein Show laid out this consensus perfectly:

Let’s take a look at economic prosperity: There is agreement, bipartisan agreement, that our economy benefits from migrant labor. That the non-agricultural, unskilled visa, the H-2B. Republican and Democratic governors, senators, House members, implore me to deploy the maximum number of visas available, and they all decry the fact that the maximum number is woefully inadequate to meet their respective jurisdictions’ needs.

Mayorkas is certainly correct that there is bipartisan support for low-wage temporary labor. This bipartisan demand extends beyond H-2B visas to the H-2A work visa for agricultural workers, as well as any number of other ways businesses bring in cheap foreign labor. This model may work well for the businesses and business owners employing low-skill migrants at poverty wages and the government collecting taxes from those businesses and business owners, but it provides no incentive for anybody to invest in the productivity of the worker.

Several years ago, American Compass chief economist Oren Cass wrote about this in his essay, “Jobs Americans Would Do”:

Flooding the low end of the domestic labor market with foreign workers may boost production but it erases the incentives to produce in ways beneficial to the lower-wage workers already here, or to share the proceeds of rising output with them. Total output may increase, but output per person will not. The nation might simultaneously become “wealthier” in aggregate and place itself on a lower trajectory for economic progress—for instance, with 50 years of declining construction-sector productivity. Owners of capital and managers of firms might see their profits and wages rise, even as the typical worker’s wage stagnates or falls.

Our leadership class sees aggregate wealth increasing and business profits going up, and they see success. Writing about the recent attention paid to the town of Springfield, Ohio, Governor Mike DeWine stated: “Springfield is having a resurgence in manufacturing and job creation. Some of that is thanks to the dramatic influx of Haitian migrants who have arrived in the city over the past three years to fill jobs.”

It’s all going well, we’re told. Forget that the U.S. citizens who live in Springfield still have problems finding jobs that pay a living wage, grapple with drug addiction, suffer from overloaded social services, and see the culture of their town change overnight in a process over which they have no agency. Springfield has gotten wealthier in aggregate than it would have been under a status quo with no migrant labor influx so, to Gov. DeWine, apparently, it’s a success story.

The people of Charleroi don’t see it that way. “I don’t believe that argument of, they had to bring that population here to save Charleroi, has any validity,” Tom Altmiller says. “We aren’t prepared for it. We don’t have the tax base for it. This is a town of 4,000 people hanging on the best they can. So whoever is responsible for putting them here? That is an act of negligence.”

According to the residents of Charleroi, 45 new Haitian students have joined the 60-person kindergarten class. The town spent $400,000 in the last year to add “two ELL [English Language Learners] teachers, an ELL coach for our teachers, a registrar, an interpreter,” added the Charleroi Superintendent. They expect to spend another $300,000 next year.

Property damage from cars crashing into buildings has increased in Charleroi in recent years. “I have never seen a town respond to so many of these calls,” Charleroi Fire Chief Robert Whiten Jr. said. “Our response area has more vehicles into buildings than anywhere else. I just can’t figure it out. Most departments have structure fires, fire alarms, medical calls, you know, but we have a lot of cars into buildings.”

“They say ‘we can’t find people to work.’ Well, that’s a half truth,” Andy Armbruster, a lifelong native of Charleroi said. “There’s people who would work if you paid them the going wage for the work. But they want to pay less and so they ended up getting involved with these agencies that bring in these workers.”

America has a different option than filling low-skill jobs with foreigners coming to our country through an abused asylum process, hodgepodge visa programs, illegal entry, and the other mechanisms on which millions of jobs are today filled. It’s the “Jobs Americans Would Do” model and requires a commitment from policymakers, business owners, and investors with capital to actually invest in the productivity of the American worker. Rather than relying on cheap labor to do low-productivity work, allowing labor scarcity to incentivize technological innovation is the path to higher-wage work.

This is a point the American economist, Julian Simon, made back in the 1980s:

It is important to recognize that discoveries of improved methods and of substitute products are not just luck. They happen in response to “scarcity”—an increase in cost. Even after a discovery is made, there is a good chance that it will not be put into operation until there is need for it due to rising cost. This point is important: Scarcity and technological advance are not two unrelated competitors in a race; rather, each influences the other.

That investment in worker productivity is what causes worker wages to go up. It’s what takes a low-skill, low-wage job that isn’t attractive to an American and transforms it into a job he or she would be interested in. Speaking in 2018, former President George W. Bush strangely cited cotton picking as an industry where America needs low-skill immigrants to do jobs “Americans won’t do”:

There are people willing to do jobs that Americans won’t do…Americans don’t want to pick cotton at 105 degrees, but there are people who want put food on their family’s tables and are willing to do that. We ought to say thank you and welcome them.

In the United States, people do not, generally, still pick cotton by hand. “Cotton picking is typically done mechanically by cotton pickers or cotton strippers in developed nations like the USA, Australia, Brazil, and Russia,” according to an academic review of current research and development in cotton harvesters published in May 2023.

If cotton picking is proof of anything, it’s that a job traditionally done by low-wage or slave labor can be transformed by cutting-edge technological innovation at the center of 21st century great power competition.

The first cotton picking machine was rolled out in the 1930s, but automation continues to transform the agricultural sector. According to a report in Ag Funders News, “It’s possible that more mechanization in the ag sector will see a decrease in reliance on H-2A in the US. That said, automation won’t happen overnight, and Western Growers expects H-2A to ‘remain an important component of major farm operations in the foreseeable future.’” In other words, price pressure is driving technological innovation. If you want to help the American worker, stop boxing him out with cheap migrant workers. Allow labor scarcity to drive technological innovation, worker productivity, and domestic wages up.

Similarly, a Charleroi business owner invited CBS News into his factory to see the work being done by migrant workers. Though only a few seconds of video is shown in the CBS report, the main task one sees workers doing in the video is manually moving bowls of food from one conveyor belt onto another. It’s not difficult to imagine automation playing a greater role in that process.

Productivity increases won’t change the nature of every low-skill job. But in a higher-wage economy with greater income to pay for low-skill services, even the service sector sees its wages go up. That’s why it was possible 50 years ago for a bartender and a maid to own their own home, raise their children in a safe neighborhood, and, ultimately, retire with dignity. Is our economy providing that same opportunity today?

Immigration policy is not just a question of economics. It has tremendous implications on our culture, our national mores, and our ability to provide dignity and basic services to our citizens. What is being done to these communities is a tragedy, and it is an avoidable one. Our country’s elites have made policy choices about what kind of economy they want our nation to have. The choices they have made may be good for them, but they are destroying small towns like Charleroi, as well as our nation at large.