“My name is Ernie. I am here as a representative of a small town called Charleroi, PA, which you may have heard about here on the news recently,” truck driver Ernie Merritt told a Trump campaign rally in western Pennsylvania, last September.
“Over half of our town is now filled with Haitian immigrants and illegal immigrants that were brought in and are taking our jobs away. That there is a nation-killing practice,” Merritt continued, “Which is brought in by the federal government and, specifically, the Biden-Harris administration.
“I am here with a dire warning to every American,” Merritt said. “This isn’t going to stop unless we take our country back.”
Merritt was, of course, attacked relentlessly by many in the Biden-friendly media who claimed that, despite the complaints of local residents, Charleroi was “thriving” thanks to the massive influx of Haitian immigrants, not suffering as Merritt claimed.
The Haitians, Democrats told us, were just doing the jobs Americans won’t do at a number of food processing facilities in the area, including Fourth Street Foods, which had 1,000 employees that included approximately 700 Haitians, almost all of whom had been allowed into the country by President Joe Biden.
But how exactly did thousands of Haitians end up in a small town in western Pennsylvania? It is not exactly like Charleroi is an internationally known city. The answer is staffing agencies hired by companies such as Four Star Foods to find cheap immigrant labor. Four Star Foods used such an agency called Prosperity Services, Inc. And just weeks after Trump was sworn into office, the owner of Prosperity Services pleaded guilty to failing to pay employment taxes for his immigrant employees and harboring illegal immigrants.
Fourth Street Foods has since been hit with a civil lawsuit alleging it defaulted on nearly $90 million in loans, and it has announced mass layoffs at its Charleroi plants. Now, thousands of Haitian immigrants will be left unemployed in a strange community with no capacity to support them. Not that Charleroi had the capacity to assimilate them when Fourth Street Foods was operating at full capacity anyway.
Left unreported by national news outlets, Charleroi public schools were forced to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on special English language learning instruction for the massive number of non-English speaking Haitian immigrants flooding their schools. Did Fourth Street Foods or Prosperity Services pick up the tab for extra English language instruction? Did they help pay for all the time lost by the native children of Charleroi, who lost vital instruction time as teachers dealt with the migrant children? Of course not.
Democratic Party elites such as Matthew Yglesias, who support mass migration, admit that “Immigration is the most politically vexing topic of our time,” but they are completely incapable of recognizing the very real pain their mass migration policies have on communities such as Charleroi.
I believe strongly in the need for police and policing,” Yglesias writes, but “ immigration enforcement kind of gives me the ick.”
THERE IS NO FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHT TO DOX LAW ENFORCEMENT
“The sort of person who wants to be a deportation officer with the ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations division,” Yglesias continues, “strikes me as weird.”
Until Democratic Party elites like Yglesias can get over the “ick” of sympathizing more with the Ernie Merritts of the world, and less with Haitian immigrants, expect more disasters like Charleroi to occur.
