Mexican workers lose on both sides of border BER

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the House and Senate next year.

Immigrant workers and others bitterly opposed the bill, but its defeat in Congress was probably due to sanctions placed on employers who hired undocumented workers and to some other features of the bill that affected employers' interests.

One of the basic ideas which underlies this proposed law is that undocumented immigrant workers—principally Mexicans-constitute a threat to the economy and to national security since, among other reasons, they take jobs and social and medical services away from U.S. workers. This idea is defended and spread by the government and the AFL-CIO. According to public opinion polls, 75 percent of the American people have swallowed this false idea.

The businesses that hire undocumented workers know this idea is untrue. Yet they have supported the proposed law-except with respect to the proposed sanction on employersbecause they know that the law will make the so-called "illegals" more vulnerable.

While U.S. companies ...U.S. sets stage (continued from page 1: “U.S. sets stage for invasion”)

unlikely to provide Nicaragua with advanced weapons. The Nov. 10 New York Times quotes an "experienced American official in Managua" who highlights what the Soviet government's actual concerns are. "The Soviet Union has an important bilateral agenda with the United States that includes things like arms control, NATO, and the Warsaw Pact, the official said. "Compared to those matters, Nicaragua is not all that important to them. They are not going to sacrifice the possibility of progress in those other areas in order to get some planes to the Sandinistas."

Response to elections

The Reagan administration's decision to create a "scare" over the contents of the Soviet freighter's cargo, besides having the objective of winning Congressional support for new funding for the contras, was also a response to the Sandinista victory in the Nicaraguan election.

The Nicaraguan elections, in which over 80 percent of those registered voted, demonstrated the broad support that the Sandinistas enjoy. The FSLN received about two-thirds of the vote, while two small capitalist parties, the Independent Liberal Party and the Democratic Conservative Party, received only 10 percent each. Eight percent of the ballots were spoiled or invalid.

The revelations about the U.S. government's involvement in trying to convince opposition candidates to withdraw discredited subsequent U.S. assertions that the elections were a sham. When Jose Arturo Cruz was initially chosen to be the candidate of a pro-capitalist coalition, he had to fly in' from Washington, D.C., where he was living, to accept the nomination. After weeks of offensive ad to Mexican workers was paid for by an employers' organization, the Bermudes Group of Industrial Parks.

The ad carried was the slogan tages."

"A cheap labor force"

In one of the rows of the chart several Asian countries were listed: Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan. In another row was Mexico with a listing of its advantages over the Asian countries. These included: "Vast natural "No other country in the world beats this powerful combination."

This idea is reaffirmed by Dennis P. Hodak, general manager of General Electric in Mexico, which is the largest and most important "maquiladora" industry in that country. Maquiladora industries are plants set up on the Mexican side of the border to process semi-manufactured products for the U.S. market. According to Hodak, the Mexican maquiladora industry has the greatest growth in the world. With a preCONNE OFF PEQUENA MONEDA • MIALL ICIV ON Page from CIA comic book distributed in Nicaragua. Drawing shows how to short out a light.

hesitations and negotiations, Cruz withdrew from the elections-apparently under pressure from the Reagan administration.

The Nicaraguan elections have undercut the Reagan administration allegations that the FSLN government is a dictatorship. The FSLN granted full democratic rights to all who did not take up arms against it; it allowed political groups to organize, hold rallies, and contest elections. The FSLN did all of this despite daily attacks by the contras and increasing pressures from imperialism and thereby demonstrated the method through which it has been able to retain its widespread support. a chart, under which "Weigh the Advandicted growth of 25 percent annually, it is increasing more rapidly than U.S. industry in its best years.

A major reason for this growth is the low wage rate prevailing in these plants. A recent story in The New York Times showed graphically the effect of the low wages on the workers. A plant manager reported that he had to hire two workers if he wanted one. This was because one worker out of two would quit after a few days on the job because he or she could not meet minimum expenses on the wages paid.

U.S. companies are closing many of their plants in this country, leaving milAs in a recurring nightmare, the soccer stadiums of Chile are again being pressed into a service for which they were never intended. In a move reminiscent of his deadly 1973 roundup, General Augusto Pinochet ordered the arrest of thousands of men and teen-age boys in police raids of two poor Santiago suburbs during the last month. Of those rounded up, 392 have been sent into internal exile in remote southern villages.

The detained people were described as "subversives" and "habitual deliquents" by a government spokesman, who also claimed that caches of arms and explosives were found. But according to The Christian Science Monitor of Nov. 13, leaders in Silva Henriquez, one of the raided shantytowns, say that the weapons were brought in by the police for a staged "discovery" filmed by state television.

Repressive moves by the government have increased drastically since a state of siege was declared by Pinochet on Nov. 6. The new diktat came in response to the 11th National Day of Protest and the one-day general strike of October 29, which paralyzed the near totality of the nation's economy. During those protests, seven people were killed and dozens injured at the hands of the special police.

The president was freed to extend his despotic rule by the resignation of his SOCIALIST ACTION lions of workers without jobs. The unemployment of American workers is not due to undocumented workers. The bosses move in search of cheap labor.

They move to Mexico or they move to the South or Southwest United States where 80 percent of the Mexican immigrant labor force is concentrated. It is not strange, therefore, that Los Angeles and Houston are two of the most dynamic poles of industrial development in the United States.

The "maquiladora" industry Moreover, William L. Mitchell, director of the Bermudes Group of Industrial Parks in El Paso, Texas, goes much further in this respect when he says that "for each job that is created in Mexico in the 'maquiladora' industry, nearly 2.5 jobs are supported or generated in American plants. There are 5000 jobs in El Paso, Texas, that are connected with the 'maquiladoras' in Ciudad Juarez."

The cheap Mexican labor does not produce unemployment in the United States. On the contrary, it generates and supports jobs. There is scarcely any difference between cheap Mexican labor used in the United States and that which is used in Mexico. They are the same companies, the same bosses, and the same workers. The difference is that the Mexican workers on the "other side,, in the U.S., have jobs but no "permission to work, whereas in Mexico they have "permission" but no jobs.

So the problem is not whether workers are undocumented or documented, Mexicans or citizens of the United States. The problem resides in the dynamics and necessities of the U.S. economy. cabinet on Nov. 5. Secretary-General Alfonso Marquez de la Plata, in announcing the resignations, said that the action had been taken "so that the president can take whatever decisions he believes necessary."

The first of these decisions was a ban on political meetings and on the distribution of opposition and church-sponsored political news. The renewed censorship has closed six of Chile's most popular magazines.

Along with the worsening human rights situation has come a constantly deteriorating economy. The devaluation of the peso in September was followed by rising inflation, which reached 8 percent in October alone. According to The Christian Science Monitor (Nov. 13), one-fourth of the workforce remains jobless or on government make-work programs that pay less than $40 per month.

The Catholic Church added its voice to the growing chorus of resistance in late November. After a Spanish priest who headed the Chilean church's human rights office was prevented from returning from a visit to Rome, the Archbishop of Santiago called a day of prayer and fasting to protest "subversive" and "repressive" violence. • Pinochet has weathered several earlier crises, but the growing mass opposition, which took a qualitative leap forward in November, is putting his continued ability to rule into question.

DECEMBER 1984

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revolt as happening from the bottom up rather than from the top down, as Ehrenreich does. We can assume that the same forces that were shaping the female revolt and which produced the women's liberation movement did not leave men untouched. Finally, we can show that the male revolt has been about the whole masculine role and not solely about the breadwinner ethic, which is only a small part of everything that has been put up for question.

Let's examine some of these forces. The late 1950s and early 1960s saw the rise of the civil rights and ban-the-bomb movements, involving many thousands of people. In both of these movements nonviolent civil disobedience played a prominent role, and a new image of courage, one that was not "twofisted" was projectea. botn men ana women partici pated in these movements, taking equal risks. In the civil rights movement, both men and women were violently assaulted and sometimes killed.

The antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s led to a generalized questioning of the society as a whole and all of its conformist mores. This questioning gave impetus to the feminist movement, the gay liberation movement, and the environmentalist movements. It led, in the 1980s, to new disarmament and The feminist and gay movements, of course, directly attacked the established gender roles. But the antiwar and disarmament movements imply that the "Be a Marine" image of masculinity has something drastically wrong with it. The environmentalist movement implies that concern, a traditionally female response, is a more intelligent way to deal with the world than stoic reserve, a traditionally It is no surprise that when mass movements put people into motion, that activity will have a reflection within the establishment. One segment will try to oppose it and another section will try to coopt it. Ehrenreich believes that she has shown how the establishment has changed men because some of its members were discontented. What she has in fact shown, and shown well, is the reflection within the establishment of the pressures from below as a segment of the establishment moved to contain, refashion, and profit from this revolution in the way men viewed themselves and their roles in life. antiwar movements. male response. Social movements alter roles

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resources" "A cheap labor force,, "More productivity for less money, and