As you depart Manhattan on the George Washington
Bridge, a brief interval on I-95 takes you to Exit 69 for I-80, the access
point to New Jersey’s third-largest city, Paterson, and ultimately to the
Delaware Water Gap, a geologically arresting gateway to Pennsylvania’s Pocono
Mountains. Following Pennsylvania’s toll bridge, you’ll pass billboards for
resorts, outlet stores, and chain restaurants along a highway lined by
hemlocks, mountain laurel, and birch trees. Westward, all road signs direct
drivers toward Hazleton, a small city located near the crossroads of I-80 and
I-81, one of the East Coast’s busiest intersections for truck traffic.
Centrally situated in northeastern Pennsylvania’s
anthracite coal region, Hazleton (population 25,000) sits on a plateau named
Spring Mountain and boasts of being the most elevated incorporated city in the
state. To first-time visitors or passing drivers, Hazleton presents itself as a
compact vista of hilly blocks, packed with duplex homes, bungalows, and ornate
church steeples, designating allegiance to the Latin or Eastern Rite. Its
surroundings make a dramatic contrast of picturesque agricultural valleys,
dense forests, and landscapes scarred by coal operations.
With a population long dominated by the
descendants of European immigrants, Hazleton has been radically transformed
since the early 2000s by secondary chain migration, principally driven by
Dominicans—immigrants, both legal and illegal, as well as second- and
third-generation citizens arriving from the New York metropolitan area. In
2000, Hispanics made up less than 5 percent of Hazleton’s population; they now
account for more than 50 percent. Such rapid and dramatic demographic shifts
are rare in U.S. cities. For Hazleton, the consequences have been profound, and
the city is struggling to cope.
Known as the Crossroads of
the East, Hazleton is a city shaped by numerous historical cycles, from its
formation as a remote mountainous village to its emergence as a center for
commerce and innovation during the Industrial Age. With the collapse of its
coal industry, it then became a stable, if declining, community during the
postindustrial era. It was long an ethnically diverse city, with a rich variety
of Christian denominations and an active Jewish community, and took pride in
its working-class history and civic spirit. In a study of Hazleton in 1981,
anthropologist Dan Rose observed that the “ethnic flavor of the anthracite era
persists, and the investigator can still discern ethnic groups niched into the
present political economy as they were in the nineteenth century.” Rose called
Hazleton an “anthropological field worker’s delight,” finding it “both a city
like other American cities and a place wholly set apart. The citizens have a
deep awareness of these dichotomies and a vital sense of their place within
them.”
Hazleton native Joe Maddon recalled the city’s
almost tribal identity and pride during a news conference when he was named as
the Chicago Cubs’ manager. The distinctive Hazletonian culture stems from a
shared experience. The various European immigrant groups in Hazleton were
united—and assimilated into American life—by mining work, the labor movement,
high levels of military service, and the community’s churches and fraternal
organizations. Coal-region communities like Hazleton, historian Harold Aurand
wrote, took pride in “self-reliance, a strong work ethic, a capacity to save
born out of a psychology of scarcity, a deep commitment to family, a sense of
community, and strong religious ties.”
The city landmark that best symbolizes this
history is St. Gabriel’s Roman Catholic Church on Hazleton’s South Side. For
over 150 years, the church has served as a processing station for immigrant
newcomers. The current church, completed in 1927, magnificently commands the
city’s skyline with its pinnacled towers, copper spires, and centrally placed
rose window. St. Gabriel’s architectural scale testifies to the historical size
of its congregation. Founded in 1855 by Philadelphia’s Bishop John Neumann, a
canonized saint in the Church, St. Gabriel’s was Hazleton’s first Catholic
parish. Gaelic-speaking Irish immigrants introduced Catholicism here, having
arrived to work as mine laborers from Ireland’s County Donegal, an isolated
pocket in northwest Ulster. In Hazleton, the Ulster immigrants settled in the
wooded cluster around St. Gabriel’s, and their neighborhood became known as
Donegal Hill.
Throughout the twentieth century, St. Gabriel’s
remained associated with the city’s Irish population. Looking to court favor
during negotiations or campaigns, union bosses and politicians regularly
visited the parish. St. Gabriel’s produced Pennsylvania’s first Catholic
lieutenant governor, Thomas Kennedy, who later became national president of the
United Mine Workers. In the 1960s, St. Gabriel’s High School hired a young
Digger Phelps to coach basketball. Phelps placed shamrocks on the boys’
uniforms, portending his later role coaching Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish. At
the entrance to St. Gabriel’s today, the choir-loft door contains a large frosted
etching of St. Patrick—a tribute to the parish’s cultural past.
But the parish is no longer Irish. Beyond the
stained-glass windows, past the Italian marbled main altar and suspended bronze
light fixtures, is an ornately designed side altar honoring Our Lady of
Altagracia (Our Lady of High Grace). The altar’s painting emulates a display in
a Dominican Republic basilica. Mary is the patron saint of the Caribbean
country. The altar fits in well at a parish where priests today hold Sunday
mass in Spanish.
As recently as the early 1990s, St. Gabriel’s
held monthly Spanish masses for perhaps 50 Hispanic parishioners. The
neighborhood remained predominantly Irish, with its older residents spending
summer afternoons on their porches on South Wyoming Street or South Laurel
Street. By 2010, the church, along with the surrounding neighborhood, had been
transformed by secondary Hispanic migration. Though many Dominican residents
have ties to San José de Ocoa, a city on the island, they are typically
Dominican-Americans from the New York metropolitan region.
Dominicans started moving
to New York City in the 1960s, fleeing the Dominican Republic’s political
upheaval and mass poverty, just as Congress passed the Immigration and
Naturalization Act of 1965, a major policy reform that unleashed family-based
chain migration in the United States. Mass chain migration resulted in
Dominicans becoming Gotham’s second-largest Hispanic group by 1992. Many moved
to northern Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, which transformed into
a Dominican outpost, with bodegas, Pentecostal congregations, restaurants, and
cab fleets bearing a Dominican cultural stamp. The Dominican New Yorkers tended
to isolate themselves in the neighborhood, preserving their island culture with
the aid of modern communications. A 2002 SUNY Albany study on Hispanic
residential patterns found that, compared with other Hispanic immigrant groups,
Dominicans had higher levels of residential segregation. The “average
Dominican,” the report noted, “lives in a neighborhood where only one of eight
residents is a non-Hispanic white.” Doubtless as a partial consequence of its
isolation, the Dominican community has lower levels of income and higher
unemployment, and receives public assistance to a greater degree, than other
Hispanic groups.
While New York has enjoyed sustained prosperity
and plunging crime rates since the mid-1990s, Washington Heights has remained
relatively unsafe and impoverished, and its public schools are dismal. Over
time, facing these urban woes, more and more Dominican residents wanted to
escape. The September 11 attacks intensified that desire.
Hazleton’s budget can’t keep pace with all the new arrivals, many
of whom need special services.
Hazleton’s low crime rate, affordable housing,
stable schools, idyllic neighborhoods, and proximity to New York made it a
perfect choice for relocation. In 1990, just 249 Hispanics lived in Hazleton,
making up 1 percent of the city’s residents. But the earliest New York
transplants loved their new home. “Most people in New York City think life in
Pennsylvania as we’re living it is a dream,” a new resident told the Hazleton Standard-Speaker in 1991. “I can sit down in my house, open
my door, watch TV to 10 or 11 at night. I don’t have to worry about someone
walking in shooting me, ripping me off.” Another Hispanic transplant said that
Hazleton should prepare for mass migration. “People of Hazleton have to realize
we are going to keep pouring in,” he told the Standard-Speaker. “If not they have to learn we are just as free
as they are. They can’t deny us anything. They have to start dealing with us.
If they don’t deal with us, push has come to shove, and we’ll deal with them
like in New York City.” After the towers fell, Dominican migrants began
arriving en masse.
The texture of Hazleton
life changed seemingly overnight. Vinyl banners with loud graphics soon came to
dominate the facades of sober nineteenth-century retail buildings. Pentecostal
and evangelical congregations now fill former Catholic and Protestant churches.
Blocks of duplex homes, uniformly encased with aluminum siding, crowd with
families living in Section 8 housing or in subdivided rental units. Satellite
dishes adorn these properties, providing access to Spanish-language television
stations. Elegant mansions, once owned by coal operators and merchants, have
fallen into structural decay because of absentee landlords’ neglect.
The demographic composition of the Hazleton Area
School District has grown steadily more Hispanic. In 2007, the district was 28
percent Hispanic and 69 percent non-Hispanic white. As of 2014, the district
was 45 percent Hispanic and 51 percent non-Hispanic white. In recent years,
Dominican parents living in New York have commonly signed over custody of their
children to relatives or friends in Hazleton so that the children can go to
better schools. But Hazleton’s budget can’t keep pace with all the new
arrivals, many of whom need special services. A district that had need for only
one ESL teacher in the 1990s, for example, now has 2,298 English-language
learners, nearly 20 percent of its student body; more than half the student
body today live in low-income households. By 2017, the school
district—encompassing over 250 square miles of southern Luzerne County,
northern Schuylkill County, and western Carbon County—faced a $6 million
deficit, in part driven by the demographic change. According to the
Pennsylvania Department of Education’s School Performance Profile data, the
school district generally scores low in academics. The high school, for
example, registered a failing 57.2 academic score for the 2016–17 school year.
With Hazleton facing a nearly $900,000 deficit in
2017, Mayor Jeffrey Cusat applied for and received designation from the
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as a financially distressed city. The designation
allows Pennsylvania to assist Hazleton in managing its finances and debt. The
distress stems from diminished tax revenues, plummeting real-estate values, and
the city’s shifting demography, which has led to a surge in demand for services
such as public-safety efforts. Rising employee costs and pension obligations
have added to the city’s precarious fiscal position. The state’s report on
Hazleton’s budget crisis concluded that “the demographic and income changes
affecting the city will only compound the future financial challenges.”
Violent crime
increased 170 percent between 2000 and 2014, prompting the city to take more
aggressive policing measures. (ELLEN F. O’CONNELL/HAZLETON STANDARD-SPEAKER/AP
PHOTO)
Crime has been a big challenge. In 2011, the U.S. Justice
Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) released a report on
eastern Pennsylvania’s drug and gang threat. It focused on Hazleton as a
regional center for illegal drug distribution. According to the report,
Dominican drug-trade organizations (DTOs) and gangs started controlling the
city’s wholesale drug distribution in the 1990s.
Hazleton’s proximity to I-80 and I-81 made the
city an ideal location for Dominican DTOs to centralize their cocaine and
heroin operations. The NDIC, which folded into the Drug Enforcement
Administration in 2012, noted how “the presence of a long-established Dominican
population, along with interstate highways that directly connect Hazleton to
other Dominican populations in New York and New England, makes the city a
favorable destination for Dominican fugitives seeking a place to operate away
from law enforcement pressure in those areas.” In the early 2010s, the opening
of a minimum-security halfway house in a historic hotel building in downtown
Hazleton worsened the drug-trade problem. When released, halfway-house inmates,
it turned out, often committed drug-related crimes or joined local gangs. By
2013, the halfway house yielded to community pressure, closing its facility.
For many Hazletonians, the city reached a grim
tipping point in 2006, when two illegal immigrants from the Dominican Republic
were charged with murdering a 29-year-old father of three. The killing shocked
the community. Hazleton’s then-mayor, Lou Barletta, responded by introducing an
ordinance, soon passed by the city council: the Illegal Immigration Relief Act,
which fined and penalized employers and landlords for hiring and renting to
illegal immigrants. The ACLU challenged the act, and the fight went to the
Supreme Court. In 2014, the Court declined to review two federal appellate
decisions that struck down the measure. The following year, a U.S. district
court judge ruled that Hazleton had to pay $1.4 million to the attorneys who
had sued the city over the act. The judge’s order was devastating for a
cash-strapped city struggling to provide adequate services to its growing
Hispanic population.
The Standard-Speaker called
Hazleton a “city under siege.” A New York Times Magazine profile
of Hazleton’s heroin epidemic described the city’s Alter Street neighborhood as
an “overt drug market linked to crime and decay.” The North Wyoming Street
neighborhood—once a thriving stretch of Italian eateries, theaters,
barbershops, and retail—grew notorious for its gang activity and drugs. Crime
statistics reflected visual realities. In 2014, the city reported 119 violent
crimes—an increase of 170 percent since 2000. In the early 2010s, Hazleton’s
homicide rate rose to four times the national average. The police department,
with a force of 34 officers in 2014, fielded 30,000 calls that year—this in a
city once known for its tranquillity.
The current police chief, Jerry Speziale, is
working hard to reverse this downward spiral. A nationally recognized leader in
law enforcement who previously served as Paterson’s police chief and Passaic
County sheriff, Speziale has revamped Hazleton’s police department by
increasing the force’s size, deploying data-driven technology, and engaging
residents through social media and community events. Though the department
continues to be bombarded with calls, the city witnessed a 40 percent reduction
in criminal activity between 2015 and 2017. The Pennsylvania Attorney General’s
Office engineered a crackdown, led by a Mobile Street Crime Unit, that has
helped the still-small department drive down the crime numbers.
Hazleton’s Dominicans live in a city that traditionally handled
diversity by emphasizing assimilation.
Clearly, Hazleton wasn’t prepared for rapid demographic change—and
it’s hard to imagine any community adapting to such a dramatic population
shift. Older Hazletonians define themselves in terms of coal and continue to
cherish their shared culture. In the late 1970s, a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter observed that the
“residents of Hazleton have an attachment to the town so strong that they scoff
at questions about why they continue to live here.” “They are genuinely
friendly people,” he continued, “who talk about strong family ties, about
knowing almost everyone in town and about growing up in an area near the
Poconos, where hunting and fishing are good and where they don’t have to be bothered
‘with all those problems you have in big cities.’ ”
The younger Dominican population, by contrast,
lacks any link to the coal industry, the fight for labor rights, or (for many)
the Roman Catholic Church. Of course, Dominicans also take pride in their
culture, but their gateway neighborhoods in New York served as an extension of
their country of origin; assimilation proved unnecessary. The pattern has
repeated itself in Hazleton. The broader Hazleton community has encouraged
Dominicans’ political and civic involvement, but the newcomers often remain
disengaged in local matters. Hazleton has become an important campaign stop for
the Dominican Republic’s leading political candidates, for example, suggesting
to many Hazleton residents that their new neighbors, even when U.S.
citizens—and many are not—retain stronger ties to their ancestral home than to
their city, or even to America. Resentments on both sides have grown.
Hazleton’s Dominicans are living in a city that
traditionally handled its immigrant diversity by emphasizing assimilation, but
today’s conversations about immigration often downplay, and even dismiss,
assimilation. During the Obama years, liberal elites, and many conservatives,
ignored Americans’ longing for community stability. As columnist Peggy Noonan
puts it, such elites, safely removed from the “roughness of the world,” have
often supported immigration policies, including tolerating large numbers of
illegal immigrants, that are harmful toward the “unprotected”—those living in
struggling cities like Hazleton. “If you are an unprotected American—one with
limited resources and negligible access to power—you have absorbed some lessons
from the past 20 years’ experience of illegal immigration,” Noonan wrote. “You
know the Democrats won’t protect you and the Republicans won’t help you.”
This was true of Hazleton, part of a county that,
until recently, found political refuge in the Democratic Party. Luzerne
County’s voters, though ideologically agnostic, nurtured an enduring belief in
the legacy of the New Deal. But they felt increasingly betrayed by Democrats,
who seemed unconcerned by the underlying problems of their communities. Many
Hazleton residents preserve and maintain their century-old homes, spanning
generations in their family. But they reside in neighborhoods now afflicted by
late-night gunshots, noise-ordinance violations, drug deals, and blighted
properties.
Accumulating socioeconomic angst translated into
support for Donald Trump. In the 2016 Republican primary, Trump won 77 percent
of Luzerne County’s vote. Wilkes-Barre, the county seat, became a regular stop
for Trump throughout the campaign. In November, Trump again dominated in the
county, helping to ensure his historic victory in Pennsylvania. The county,
like the state, went Republican for the first time since 1988.
Former Hazleton mayor Lou Barletta, now a
congressman, understood the frustrations of his community long before the 2016
election, as his 2006 immigration measure showed. On Capitol Hill, he has
spoken regularly about the problems caused by mass low-skill immigration and
chain migration. Trump has encouraged Barletta to challenge the Democratic
incumbent, Senator Bob Casey, in the November 2018 election. A race between
Barletta and Casey, two sons of the anthracite coal region, would prove a
national test for Trump voters’ continuing leverage.
Charles F. McElwee is a writer based in northeastern Pennsylvania.
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