‘They Just Took the Mexican Fellas Away’

“C omo estas, how are you, senor? “ Ramon asks, as his blue rag makes its quick, methodical way across the windshield of my car.

“Mucho trabajo, poco dinero, “ I respond with exaggerated weariness. “Much work, little money.”

It’s an old line, often repeated, but we chuckle together all the same. Even among casual acquaintances, it is somehow reassuring to know that nothing much has changed. I don’t know when we first spoke; it may have been five years ago, maybe six. I know his name because, somewhere during that time, I heard a co-worker call him by it.

Ramon is one of 10 or 12 men employed to do the hand-wiping at the carwash I use. He has the barrel chest and the broad, chiseled features that have marked the faces of the Indian people from Mexico’s southern highlands since the time of the Olmecs. Beneath his unbuttoned plaid shirt is a white T-shirt with a motto emblazoned on its chest: “Yo Chiapas,” it says.

Our brief conversations are conducted in what might be called “Spanglish,” the mixture of pidgin Spanish (mine) and pidgin English (his) that forms the patois in which millions of small commercial transactions are conducted in this state each day.

Still, over the years, I’ve learned a bit about Ramon. He works seven days a week at two carwashes. The one I patronize is his favorite because he receives an hourly wage. At the other, he gets only tips.

He lives with three other men from Chiapas in a one-room apartment in the Pico Union area. Each week, after the bills are paid, he sends the money that’s left to his family back home, where the land is poor and there are many mouths. On Saturdays--if the tips have been good--he likes to walk up La Brea to one of the Mexican taxi-dance bars south of Wilshire. He can’t afford the girls, but the beer is cheap, and the view of the tiny dance floor bathed in colored lights costs nothing at all.

His is an arduous life lived with uncomplaining peasant stoicism. But Ramon is sin papeles , without papers--an illegal immigrant. In the eyes of many here, that makes him not a quiet, hard-working guy who likes a cold beer at the end of the day, but a social problem. And, in an election year dominated by economic issues, it is a social problem over which George Bush’s Administration is eager to demonstrate its mastery.

This week, U.S. Atty. Gen. William P. Barr came to San Diego to announce the latest in a seemingly endless series of initiatives to seal our porous border with Mexico. There will be hundreds of new border patrol agents, and work permits will be more difficult to forge. Military vehicles will be drafted into service along the border, and at the most heavily used crossing points, there will be additional lights, fences and barricades.

By the end of this year, federal authorities believe they will have apprehended nearly 2 million illegal immigrants, more than the record 1.76 million arrested in 1986. How many other millions will escape detection to find a place in America’s fields and carwashes and kitchens is anybody’s guess.

What we can be sure of is that the overwhelming majority of those arrested will be Spanish-speaking, obviously non-Anglo people like Ramon.

That was brought home to me a few months ago, in a village on the southwest coast of Ireland. It was late in the afternoon, and I was in a seat by the fire in a tiny, one-room pub savoring a pint of the local Murphy’s stout and the intricacies of the Dublin papers. At the next table, two young men in their 20s nursed their drinks and discussed the job prospects in “the States.”

One of them was just home after a year in America; he planned to return “after Christmas.” He was full of advice for his friend, not long out of school: “There’s no problem getting work,” he said, “and there’s good jobs to be had on the building sites.”

“Don’t you need papers?” his friend asked, “I’ve heard there’s nothing to be had if you’re not in the union.”

“That’s true, but if you go to Boston or to San Francisco, like I did, there’s always a couple of Irish lads in the union office who’ll see you right.”

“But what about the police? Don’t they want your papers?”

“Not at all. I was on a mammoth building site in Los Angeles, one of these great skyscrapers they’re putting up there. The immigration boys came on the site and the boss told us just to stand and be silent.”

“Were any of you arrested?”

“None of us. They just took all the Mexican fellas away.”

And left behind the illegal Irish and the Canadians and the English and the French and everyone else who, though lacking papers, has the right looks and a charming accent.

This bias has always been a component of our national attitude toward immigration. In this difficult and unsettled election year we can see it in several places. It is the unspoken assumption behind the anti-immigrant features in Gov. Pete Wilson’s welfare initiative. It is an explicit part of Republican presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan’s campaign.

Buchanan puts it this way: “I think God made all people good, but if we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia? There is nothing wrong with us sitting down and arguing that issue that we are a European country, an English-speaking country.”

Few of his listeners will recall that, earlier in this century, these were precisely the objections raised against the admission of Jews, Japanese, Slavs and Italians.

Like his listener’s parents and grandparents, these new immigrants are a daring and indomitable group. But these are hard times, and in the furnace of our electoral politics, old embers--”America first”--and new flames--”economic security”--are smoldering. Something will have to give way; someone is likely to get burned.