STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Let's try to look at reality behind a political campaign story. Former President Trump's campaign famously talked about immigrants in an Ohio town, and then they talked about Haitians in Pennsylvania, in a town called Charleroi. Oliver Morrison of our member station WESA visited that town and found there is a story, though it's a little different.
OLIVER MORRISON, BYLINE: Just weeks after Trump called out Haitian immigrants in Ohio, he called out the Haitians in Charleroi.
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DONALD TRUMP: The housing market is destroyed. Crime is rampant. The jobs are taken by migrants illegally imported to our countries.
MORRISON: Trump made those remarks at a campaign rally just an hour away from Charleroi. Three days before, the town's Republican leaders held a rally about what they said was the more pressing concern - the town's historic glass factory had just been slated to close at the end of the year. Danielle Byrne, a worker at the factory and a union rep, spoke at the rally.
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DANIELLE BYRNE: If this takes place, it'll devastate the town. Not only that, but 300 hardworking people will lose good-paying jobs.
MORRISON: The glass plant makes the popular Pyrex cookware, which the Corning glass company started manufacturing in Charleroi before World War II. Byrne met her husband at the plant, and her grandfather worked there for 50 years.
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BYRNE: Growing up just three streets up the block from the factory, at 12 o'clock every day when the Corning blew their lunch whistle, my grandfather would reset his watch or the clocks in the house because there was no other time but Corning time, and it was always right.
MORRISON: Today, 1 out of every 4 people in Charleroi lives in poverty. And the town's biggest employer is now Fourth Street Barbecue, a frozen food manufacturer that makes things like breakfast sandwiches and breakfast bowls. The company's CEO, Chris Scott, says frozen food companies hire a lot of foreign-born workers because there aren't enough Americans applying. And recently, that's meant hiring Haitian immigrants in Charleroi, a number of whom were putting finished bowls into boxes on a recent day.
CHRIS SCOTT: We have three bowl lines, about 50 people in this room. We'll make somewhere in the vicinity of a quarter of a million bowls a day out of this room alone.
MORRISON: Fourth Street Barbecue ran into a problem during the pandemic as demand picked up. Owner Dave Barbe wanted to hire nearly a thousand workers to fill orders that would end up on the shelves of Walmart and Aldi. But Charleroi and most of the small valley towns nearby have been losing population for decades. Even hiring a single mechanic was a challenge, Barbe said.
DAVE BARBE: We offered $30 an hour, and we offered a $1,000 signing bonus, and I had one applicant. I had two, actually. The other guy didn't show up for the interview.
MORRISON: So Barbe reached out to other food companies who told him about staffing agencies. And with the help of those agencies, Barbe started to bring in immigrant labor. The company ended up hiring workers from more than three dozen countries. Joseph Patrick Murphy is an immigration lawyer in Pittsburgh. In 2019, he started getting so many requests for legal help from Charleroi that he set up an office there every Sunday. He said Haitians started showing up three years later, and that accelerated when the Biden administration granted them temporary protected status that allowed them to live and work in the country.
JOSEPH PATRICK MURPHY: You could quickly get them legal and quickly get them work permits, and they were able to get them. So that's what made them so desirable.
MORRISON: But since Trump's attacks on Haitians, both Murphy and Barbe, the owner of Fourth Street, say they have faced aggressive threats from residents. Scott, Fourth Street's CEO, say they're now making contingency plans after Trump threatened to remove Haitians from the country during a TV interview. Some of the Haitians in town have also become worried about their safety and legal status. Pierre Richard Momplaisir moved to Charleroi from Haiti and drives a forklift for Fourth Street. He thinks many of his fellow Haitians will eventually move away.
PIERRE RICHARD MOMPLAISIR: Once they get money, they can pay own (ph). They can buy a car. They just leave in - to live to the big towns like New York City.
MORRISON: Meanwhile, the glass plant in town announced this month that it was going to begin layoffs just before Christmas, despite some last-ditch efforts by politicians to save the plant. Kevin Heubner, one of the people who is set to lose his job at the plant, doesn't like that political attention has been diverted.
KEVIN HEUBNER: The Haitian issue, I don't believe is really an issue. Yes, there's a lot of them, but they're not causing any problems as far as we know.
MORRISON: And the future of Charleroi's biggest employer now, Fourth Street Foods, could be in the hands of whoever wins the election.
For NPR News, I'm Oliver Morrison in Charleroi, Pennsylvania. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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