Factories are shutting down. Migrants are flooding the town. Is it immigration or an invasion?

Charleroi, Pennsylvania, has been in economic decline for decades, but in recent years this small borough of about 4200 has seen a massive influx of perhaps 2500 noncitizens, mostly Haitian immigrants.

The influx began in mid-to-late 2021 but has greatly accelerated within the last two years.

Ashley Duff, a resident of the Charleroi Area School District, gives this assessment of the troubled borough:

The borough has been in steady decline ever since the mills closed after the glory days of the 1960’s and 1970’s. It is a similar story all the way up the Monongahela River including Donora, Monessen, Elrama, West Elizabeth, McKeesport, Glassport, Clairton, etc.

As the immigrants came to Charleroi, I’m sure some folks left because they felt like outsiders in the place they’ve called home for decades. However, some left because they were simply pushed out of the places they were renting to make way for the immigrants to come in. So no matter how you slice it, the native population is definitely in a spiraling decline.

With millions crossing the southern border in recent years under the Biden administration nearly every part of the country may be dealing with the migrant problems facing Charleroi today.

Do these non-citizens register to vote and participate in our elections?

Some election officials say “no,” but others are aware it’s the “honor system” in filling out registration forms that say only citizens can vote. There is no independent verification of the citizenship requirement on voter registration forms in most states.

In a place like Charleroi, with thousands of recently-settled noncitizen immigrants, are any tempted to participate in the US election process?

The details below will:

• Look at the voter registrations of the Charleroi borough, as well as the surrounding Charleroi Area School District in Washington County over the last four years. [Numbers are declining.]
• Study trends in registration numbers and party affiliation by school district, municipality and precinct. [Democrat percentages are declining, Republican percentages are increasing.]
• Explore counts of voter registrations by month back to 2016. [Patterns from 2024 are similar to past years.]
• Determine if there are new registrations at rental properties owned by the employer of many migrants. [There is no evidence migrants are registering.]

So are the immigrants in Charleroi registering to vote? Thankfully as of yet, it looks like not. But as more immigrants obtain driver’s licenses, the concern will likely continue since Governor Josh Shapiro in 2023 signed Pennsylvania up for the dreaded DMV automatic voter registration. Will the Haitians soon find themselves on the voter rolls after getting behind the wheel? Time will tell.

The statistics below show the Charleroi immigrants are not registering to vote, at least not in any significant numbers, but they appear to be triggering political changes in the electorate. Charleroi is turning from “blue” to “red,” while its decline continues.

Charleroi Area School District

The Charleroi Area School District is comprised of the boroughs of Charleroi, Dunlevy, North Charleroi, Speers, Stockdale, Twilight and Fallowfield Township.

The starting point is this table showing registered voter statistics by precinct in the CASD extracted from Oct. 7 voter registration data from the Pennsylvania Department of State:

Charleroi Borough and Fallowfield Township each consist of four precincts. This table shows a summary for these two municipalities:

Charleroi and North Charleroi have small pluralities of Democrats, but all other municipalities have a Republican plurality.

How is the influx of so many migrants changing voters in this area?

Number of Registered Voters

School district trends

The school district may have 7248 voters now, but lost 730 voters (9.15 percent) since the last presidential election in 2020.

Sparklines above are more about showing trends than exact values.

Twelve of the thirteen precincts in the school district lost voters. Only Fallowfield-2nd gained with a modest increase from 376 to 384 voters (2.1 percent).

Fewer people and increased education costs due to migrants will increase the tax burden for education.

Charleroi Borough trends

In this same time period Charleroi Borough, and its four precincts, lost 461 voters (19.5 percent), which was more than twice the loss rate of the school district.

Charleroi’s 2nd and 4th precincts lost the most: 25.2 percent and 30.9 percent, respectively. The 3rd and 6th precincts lost about 10.9 percent and 6.6 percent respectively.

The nearly 2000 recent immigrants are located almost exclusively within the downtown area of Charleroi in 2nd, 4th and 6th precincts.

The chronic high “inactive” voter rate in Charleroi is indicative of people moving out without notifying the election office. The federal NVRA removal process can be glacially slow without formal notification by those moving.

Table 1 shows that inactive rate is particularly high in the 4th precinct. Four years ago this precinct’s inactive rate was 27.5 percent.

Party affiliation trends

School district

When voters for the whole district are analyzed the number of Democrats is generally deceasing, along with percentage of Democrats.

The number and percentage of Republicans and unaffiliated voters are generally increasing.

Precincts

The sparklines below show the number of Democrats and Republicans are decreasing in precincts in the Charleroi Borough, but the percentage of Republicans is generally increasing while the number and percentage of Democrats is decreasing.

The loss of Democrats is greater than the loss of Republicans in Charleroi.

Voter registration date trends

The number of new registrations in CASD or Charleroi in 2024 by month are consistent with voter registration numbers from previous years.

For example, in Charleroi there were fifteen new registrations in July 2024, and the largest number in previous Julys was only six. Nine more is not large enough for any concern.

Perhaps a discrepancy of 50 or 100 between 2024 numbers and previous years might be worth exploring, but all the differences are small.

Counts of voters with registration dates in 2016 or later by month of registration. (Voters registered in 2015 or before are not represented here.) New registration numbers by month in 2024 are consistent with numbers from previous years.

Charleroi Borough has 123 newly registered voters in 2024 with nearly equal numbers registered in each of the four precincts: 30 in 2nd, 29 in 3rd, 33 in 4th and 31 in 6th.

Rental Property trends

A recent article gave 39 addresses of rental properties owned by Dave Barbe, who also owns Fourth Street Foods in Charleroi that reportedly employees 700 migrants. There is no evidence migrants are registered at any of these rental property addresses at this time.

Registered voters live at four of these addresses. Three of the four have been registered more than four years. Two are “inactive” and likely no longer live at the given address. The other voter is an unaffiliated voter, who registered in July 2023.

Earl Glynn the writer of Watchdog Lab, the site at which this article was originally published. It has been edited slightly for length and formatting.