Today, a close look at the history of a Pennsylvania town and how that history contains within it the story of the 2024 election. In September, Donald Trump claimed that the city of Charleroi, Pennsylvania, was being overrun by immigrants who brought violence, gangs, and economic destruction. Last month, The Atlantic’s George Packer went to Charleroi to report on what’s actually going on there, and how the issues most important to Charleroi—nativism, immigration, change, working-class decline, and corporate greed—are also the deciding issues of the 2024 election.
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In the following excerpt, Derek talks to George Packer about the town of Charleroi, Pennsylvania, and how it became one of Donald Trump’s talking points.
Derek Thompson: So America is this big, diverse, chaotic, unwieldy place. There’s no one city that contains the full mosaic of the country, but a city like Charleroi, Pennsylvania, a small town facing economic and population decline with a surge of immigrants, which had been singled out by Donald Trump and pulled into the center of the political conversation, is such a fascinating flashpoint for the issues that this election will turn on. Before we get to what those issues are specifically, tell me a little bit about this town, Charleroi, Pennsylvania. What is this place?
George Packer: Well, the town goes back to the late 19th century. It is named after a town in Belgium where there has been industry, maybe even glassmaking, like Charleroi, Pennsylvania. Belgian immigrants came to Western Pennsylvania. The town began to make Pyrex, which was, I think, uniquely made in Charleroi and is sort of the pride of the town because it’s such a durable product. But that whole area, like the entire Rust Belt, factories and population began to decline, really, in the ’60s. And it sped up in the ’70s, and by the ’80s, the decline seemed like it was almost irreversible. But it never stops. That’s the thing about decline. It’s not as though you reach a point and OK, we’ve stopped declining. That can happen with a lot of effort and luck, but more often, the population keeps dwindling. And by 2020, the population of Charleroi was about 4,200.
It’s a very small town. It’s like a dozen blocks long along the Norfolk Southern Railway and the Monongahela River. Most of the stores were empty, a lot of houses were empty, and there were still a few factories going. And then two things happened. First, beginning in about 2020, Haitian immigrants began arriving. And not because the government sent them there, but because employers sent them there, jobs sent them there, and they worked in jobs that Americans just weren’t taking, like very low-wage jobs in cold refrigerated foods preparation plants. And that has continued until now. There’s 2,000 new, relatively new, immigrants from Haiti and mostly West Africa, which is a 50 percent increase in the size of Charleroi. That’s a dramatic change.
Last month, at least in September, the owners of Pyrex, which is like a multilayered ownership of a private equity firm in New York, which has a big investment stake in a glassmaking company called Anchor Hocking, which had bought the Pyrex plant in Charleroi in a disputed bankruptcy sale that may have violated antitrust law—that company announced that it was closing the factory in Charleroi. Which was just symbolically huge because this had been the pride of the town. And it was moving the operations about three hours west to Lancaster, Ohio, and moving maybe half the jobs in case people were willing to uproot themselves from Charleroi. But basically, it would stop making Pyrex in Charleroi. And a week later, Donald Trump, probably tipped off by a local Republican, added Charleroi to his hit list of towns in America that had been overrun “with immigrants,” an invasion of them, and destroyed by them, crime, gangs, bankruptcy. And suddenly, for a very short time, Charleroi followed Springfield, Ohio, as one of Trump’s favorite targets. He then got bored with Charleroi and moved on, but it was enough to have a profound effect on the town.
Thompson: Let’s go back to the Haitian immigrants. How has their arrival changed the city? We’re talking, as you said, about a town, a small town with 2,000, maybe even more, Haitian immigrants coming in, taking these jobs, often low-paying jobs that maybe native-born Americans weren’t taking themselves. How would you say their presence has changed the city economically, culturally, socially?
Packer: So it depends on who you ask. The two city leaders I asked were the borough manager, Joe Manning, and the borough council president, Kristin Hopkins-Calcek, and they both said it had been a good thing for Charleroi to have this influx of new life because Charleroi was dying. It was emptying out. People were leaving, the buildings were vacant. And suddenly you have a bakery opening on McKean Avenue. You have a food market opening on Fallowfield Avenue. Those are the two main streets. You have children going to schools that were getting to the point where they might have to be closed down for lack of enrollment. You had new taxpayers, new renters, and new energy. They had festivals in the streets. They joined the Fourth of July parade. I talked to a Haitian immigrant named Getro Bernabe, who’s the community liaison for the borough of Charleroi. And he said, when he arrived in 2020, it was a beautiful place, but like a ghost town.
And after a few years, he described how it was sort of coming back to life, almost like a reanimated body, and how hardworking the Haitians were, which is also something I heard from others, including blue-collar workers, and how happy they were to be there. And he said, “I’ve always loved the phrase ‘e pluribus unum’ on the American coin because to me it means people from different backgrounds coming together in a unified country—unified, not fragmented.” So from that point of view, it was a good thing.
I think there were people in Charleroi, I talked to a few who felt some grievances about the immigrants, that they drove the wrong way on one-way streets, that they had overcrowded the schools and the teachers no longer had enough time for the kids of the native-born Americans because they had to deal with two different language groups. School buses were crowded. And I even heard a very strange story that the immigrant food market had had a sign up that said, “No whites allowed.” Now, this boggled my mind. It sounded really implausible that an immigrant in a new town that’s dominated by a white population would say “No whites allowed.” The picture they showed me—and these were some workers at the Pyrex factory—was of a sign that said something like “Asian, African, Caribbean, and Latin American food.” And that was enough to get complaints coming to the attention of Getro Bernabe, the community liaison, who was hearing that it didn’t say American food, and that that made people feel they weren’t welcome at the store. That’s how fragile Charleroi is. That’s how thin the line of grievance is.
This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: George Packer
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Subscribe: Spotify
