I subscribe to online emails sent to me by Chris Rufo, and I
pasted it below in its entirety, and will comment where pertinent to do so.
Rufo and reporter Christina Buttons wrote this article.
Charleroi, Pennsylvania, is a deeply
troubled place. The former steel town, built along a stretch of the
Monongahela River, south of Pittsburgh, has experienced the typical Rust
Belt rise and fall. The industrial economy, which had turned it into something
resembling a company town, hollowed out after the Second World War. Some
residents fled; others succumbed to vices. The steel mills disappeared. Two
drug-abuse treatment centers have since opened their doors.
The town’s population had steadily declined since the middle
of the twentieth century, with the most recent Census reporting slightly more than
4,000 residents. Then, suddenly, things changed. Local officials estimate
that approximately 2,000 predominantly Haitian
migrants have moved in. The town’s Belgium Club and Slovak Club are mostly
quiet nowadays, while the Haitians and other recent immigrants have quickly established their
presence, even dominance, in a dilapidated corridor downtown.”
My response: Why would the federal government push 2,000 Haitian
residents into a very troubled community of 4,000 people? That makes a bad
situation much worse.
R & B: “This change—the replacement of the old ethnics
with the new ethnics—is an archetypal American story. And, as in the past,
it has caused anxieties and, at times, conflict.
The municipal government has felt the strain. The town,
already struggling with high rates of poverty and unemployment, has been forced to
assimilate thousands of new arrivals. The schools now crowd with new
Haitian pupils, and have had to hire translators
and English teachers. Some of the old pipes downtown have started releasing
the smell of sewage. And, according to a town
councilman, there is a growing sense of trepidation about the alarming number of car crashes, with some vehicles
reportedly slamming into buildings.
Among the city’s old guard, frustrations are starting to
boil over. Instead of being used to revitalize these communities, these
residents argue, resources get redirected to the new arrivals, who undercut
wages, drive rents up, and, so far, have failed to assimilate. Worst of
all, these residents say, they had no choice—there was never a vote on the
question of migration; it simply materialized.”
My response: Too many immigrants without the right cultural and
value orientation tear up a community and a country, and these residents
had no say in what the government did to their community.
R & B: “Former president Donald Trump, echoing the
sentiments of some of Charleroi’s native citizens, has cast the change in a
sinister light. As he told the crowd at a recent rally in
Indiana, Pennsylvania, “it takes centuries to build the unique character of
each state. . . . But reckless migration policy can change it quickly and
permanently.” Progressives, as expected, countered with the usual arguments,
claiming that Trump was stoking fear, inciting nativist resentment, and
even putting the Haitian migrants in danger.”
My response: American rejection of the millions of
immigrants and their often-bad values is not racism, fearful overreaction
or nativist resentment; the objection is reasonable, but no violence should
be shown towards any immigrants either.
R & B: “Neither side, however, seems to have grappled
with the mechanics of Charleroi’s abrupt transformation. How did thousands
of Haitians end up in a tiny borough in Western Pennsylvania? What are they
doing there? And cui
bono—who benefits?
The answers to these questions have ramifications not only
for Charleroi, but for the general trajectory of mass migration under the
Biden administration, which has allowed more than 7 million migrants to enter the
United States, either illegally, or, as with some 309,000 Haitians, under ad hoc asylum
rules.
The basic pattern in Charleroi has been replicated in
thousands of cities and towns across America: the federal government has
opened the borders to all comers; a web of publicly funded NGOs has
facilitated the flow of migrants within the country; local industries have
welcomed the arrival of cheap, pliant labor. And, under these enormous
pressures, places like Charleroi often revert to an older form: that of the
company town, in which an open conspiracy of government, charity, and
industry reshapes the society to its advantage—whether the citizens want it
or not.
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 210,000 Haitiansthrough 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.
In Charleroi, one of the most active resettlement agencies
is Jewish Family and Community Services Pittsburgh. According to a September Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
report, JFCS staff have been traveling to Charleroi weekly for the past
year and a half to resettle many of the migrants. The organization has offered to help migrants sign up for
welfare programs, including SNAP, Medicaid, and direct
financial assistance. While JFCS Pittsburgh offers “employment services“ to migrants, it
denies any involvement with the employer and staffing agencies that were
the focus of our investigation.
And yet, business is brisk. In 2023, JFCS Pittsburgh reported $12.5 million in revenue, of
which $6.15 million came directly from government grants. Much of the
remaining funding came from other nonprofits that also get federal
funds, such as a $2.8 million grant from its parent organization, HIAS. And JFCS’s executives enjoy generous salaries: the CEO earned $215,590, the CFO
$148,601, and the COO $125,218—all subsidized by the taxpayer.
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.)
According to a Haitian migrant who worked at Fourth Street
and a review of video footage, three staffing agencies—Wellington Staffing Agency, Celebes Staffing Services, and Advantage Staffing Agency—are key conduits
for labor in the city. None have websites, advertise their services, or
appear in job listings. According to Scott, Fourth Street Foods relies on
agencies to staff its contract workforce, but he declined to specify which
agencies, citing nondisclosure agreements.
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.”
In recent years, a debate has raged about “replacement
migration,” which some left-wing critics have dubbed a racist conspiracy
theory. But in Charleroi, “replacement” is a plain reality. While the
demographic statistics have shifted dramatically in recent years,
replacement happens in more prosaic ways, too: a resident moves away.
Another arrives. The keys to a rental apartment change hands.”
My response: The Leftist and Democratic plot to keep borders
open through a policy of replacement migration is not disinformation, a
racist and right-wing racialist conspiracy, but is a Progressive plot to
bring in millions or tens of millions of non-Americans to vote Democrat
into perpetuity so Democrats can rule America as a UniParty, and millions
of new voters turn America into California writ large.
R & B: “In one sense, this is unremarkable. Since the
beginning, America has been the land of migration, replacement, and change.
The original Belgian settlers of Charleroi were replaced by the
later-arriving Slavic populations, who are now, in turn,
being replaced by men and women from Port-au-Prince. The economy changed
along the same lines. The steel plants shut down years ago. The glass
factory, the last remaining symbol of the Belgian glass-makers, might
suspend operations soon. The largest employer now produces frozen
meals.
In another sense, however, legitimate criticisms can be made
of what is happening in Charleroi. First, the benefits of mass migration
seem to accrue to the organized interests, while citizens and taxpayers
absorb the costs. No doubt, the situation is advantageous to David Barbe of
Fourth Street Foods, who can pay $16 an hour to the agencies that employ
his contract labor force, then recapture some of those wages in rent—just
like the company towns from a century ago.
But for the old residents of Charleroi, who cherish their
distinct heritage and fear that their quality of life is being compromised,
it’s mostly downside. The evictions, the undercut wages, the car crashes,
the cramped quarters, the unfamiliar culture: these are not trivialities,
nor are they racist conspiracy theories. They are the signs of a
disconcerting reality: Charleroi is a dying town that could not revitalize
itself on its own, which made it the perfect target for “revitalization” by
elite powers—the federal government, the NGOs, and their local satraps.
The key question in Charleroi is the fundamental question of
politics: Who decides? The citizens of the United States, and of Charleroi,
have been assured since birth that they are the ultimate sovereign. The
government, they were told, must earn the consent of the governed. But the
people of Charleroi were never asked if they wanted to submit their borough
to an experiment in mass migration. Others chose for them—and slandered
them when they objected.
The decisive factor, which many on the institutional Left
would rather conceal, is one of power. Martha’s Vineyard, when faced with a
single planeload of migrants, can evict them in a flash. But Charleroi—the
broken man of the Rust Belt—cannot. This is the reality of replacement: the
strong do what they can, and the weak endure what they must.”
My response: The strong, the Leftist ruling elite, are
sheltered from the consequences of too much immigration, but the weak or
commoners, must deal with it directly in their neighborhoods, and are told
to endure it while shutting up about it.
R & B: “Christopher
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