A Troubled Place

Charleroi, Pennsylvania, is a deeply troubled place. {snip}

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.

{snip}

{snip} How did thousands of Haitians end up in a tiny borough in Western Pennsylvania? What are they doing there? And cui bono—who benefits?

{snip}

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 more than 210,000 Haitians through 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.”

{snip}