In an interview, Charleroi Borough Manager Joe Manning flatly said that Trump's claims are false or simply do not apply to his town in any sense. "There's what the former president is saying," Manning told me, "and then there's easily observable reality."
Trump's assertions about Haitians and Charleroi echo his many lies about Springfield. He portrayed Charleroi as absolutely overrun with migrants, as if it's succumbing to a foreign "invasion," a word he also used at the Pennsylvania rally.
"Not far from here, the 4,000-person town of Charleroi ... has seen a 2,000 percent increase in the population," Trump seethed at the rally, which was held in Indiana, Pennsylvania. He suggested that Charleroi has become a "totally different place."
But that's not close to true, according to Manning. He says the town's population of Haitians is actually "between 700 and 800." Manning pointed out that if Trump's claim were true"and this town of just over 4,000 had seen a 2,000 percent increase"it would suddenly have a population closer to 100,000. Recounting this idea to me, Manning burst out laughing.
At his rally, Trump also ramped up the zero-sum rhetoric about immigrants taking American jobs. "Another front in Kamala's war on workers is her gigantic migrant invasion," he said.
Trump even embellished this with an elaborate tale in which Harris is chief engineer behind a project to "inundate Pennsylvania communities." He held up Charleroi as an example of this throughout, telegraphing his closing argument in this must-win state.
But this rhetoric simply doesn't apply to Charleroi, Manning said. He noted that many of the Haitians work at a local packaging plant whose owner could not find workers, and went to an employment agency for help. That agency got Haitians to come work in the borough"in other words, locals, and not Harris, enticed them there"and they liked the place, Manning said, so they "put down roots."
The key tell here, Manning pointed out, is that even now, with the Haitians already in the town, the packaging plant owner is still looking for workers.
"They ain't taking anybody's jobs," Manning said, noting that they are helping revitalize the town, just as immigrants are reviving other Rust Belt towns amid postindustrial population decline. "They have occupied places that were vacant for years because a lot of people moved out of here," he noted.
What about Trump's claim that towns across Pennsylvania are being swamped by job-stealing immigrants? Well, the state's unemployment rate is 3.4 percent, so it's unclear how this represents a "war on workers," as Trump says. As Paul Krugman explains, immigrants often boost employment for the native-born in such communities, because they spend money in them. As for Trump's suggestion that immigrants are unleashing a crime wave in the state, asked whether there's been any uptick in crime in Charleroi, Manning bluntly replied: "No."
