Oh, Now Josh Shapiro Cares About Charleroi?

27.09.2024 07:15

For the past week, my team at America 2100 and I have been in Charleroi, Pennsylvania — a downwardly mobile, 4,000-person town in the southwestern part of the state. We went to Charleroi to document and report on the flood of thousands (now well over 2,000, according to one Charleroi borough councilman) of primarily Haitian immigrants into the town over the past few years. Charleroi — already a vulnerable working-class town — has seen its immigrant population grow “by over 2,000% in just the last two years,” according to a March report from a local outlet. Springfield, Ohio, was never a one-off; there are now dozens of stories just like it, in towns across the country.

The new weight bearing down upon the town is palpable. Car crashes are soaring. The schools are overwhelmed. Public services are strained. Houses — some packed with 15 to 20 Haitians at a time — are falling into disrepair or worse. The budget can’t keep up — and nobody at the state or federal level seems particularly interested in lending a helping hand. Charleroi, as one resident told us, is “a place that time forgot” — “nobody cares about Charleroi, Pennsylvania.” An unfashionable little town, filled with unfashionable little people, is of little to no concern to political elites in either party. If the businesses around Charleroi want to transform the town forever in pursuit of their unquenchable thirst for cheap foreign labor, who are we to stop them?

“Where’s [Pennsylvania Governor Josh] Shapiro?”, Larry Celaschi, a Charleroi borough councilman, wondered out loud to us last week. It was a question we heard repeatedly from locals. Shapiro — like most of the political class ostensibly elected to represent Charleroi — hadn’t seen fit to even acknowledge the crisis. That changed today, when Shapiro finally saw fit to at least weigh in … during an interview with a left-wing New Republic journalist, Greg Sargent.

In an interview today, Sargent noted that Donald Trump — following on our reporting last week — had “attacked the population of Haitians that have moved to Charleroi in the southwestern part of the state” and suggested “towns and villages across PA are ‘inundated’” in a rally earlier this week. Shapiro responded by trashing the claims as “bulls**t,” adding:

Charleroi is a wonderful community in Washington County, Pennsylvania, a community that has seen migrants contribute to their economy, contribute to their community. You’ve heard that from residents in the area. Charleroi is also a community that’s facing serious economic challenges. Instead of actually offering something that’s going to help them address their economic challenges, Donald Trump goes and s**ts on the community. It’s not only disrespectful, it’s really dangerous.

When Donald Trump creates a kind of “others” in our community, he puts people at risk and he makes us all less safe. That is really, really dangerous and destructive. I’ll tell you the other thing. They do have, as I said a moment ago, serious economic challenges with plant closures and other things. As governor, I’m working with the community to help lift them up, to help address that. I’d love to have elected officials and wannabe elected officials like Donald Trump actually do something constructive that helps the community instead of tearing them down.

I can’t speak for the residents of Charleroi, but I’m glad Shapiro appears to have finally noticed they exist. (After all, that — reminding America that they exist, and matter — was the central goal of our reporting). But I can’t say I’m surprised he took the opportunity to essentially imply that the town’s native population — at least, the ones who object to the top-to-bottom transformation of their community — was racist. Sure, he’ll claim he was only talking about Trump. But the vast majority of locals we spoke to agreed with Trump’s assessment. It’s notable that all the mainstream media reports on Charleroi since it entered the national spotlight have relied heavily on a handful of sources in local office — most notably, the borough manager and the two liberal members of the borough council — who share the media’s opinion on immigration. The average local, by and large, does not. Shapiro might have known that, had he ever taken the time to go to Charleroi and talk to them himself.

Was It Worth the Empanadas?

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