13.

Such leakages normally reflect either disagreement with Washington's policies or administrative mismanagement, but we encountered one story about a 67 year-old neighborhood aid in a poverty program which suggests another factor. The gentleman had arranged for the admission of five young ladies, all Mexican residents, to an OEO-funded training program in return for which each of them spent one night a week with him. He was fired and the ladies dropped from the training program.

14. Letters from the Civil Service Commission, from the Department of the Interior and the Department of Defense, to the author.

15. Letter from the Department of Defense to the author.

16. Brian Rungeling, in his Ph.D. thesis, "Impact of the Mexican Alien Commuter on the Apparel Industry of El Paso, Texas," (Lexington, Kentucky, 1969), estimates that 23 to 40 percent of the garment workers in El Paso are commuters.

17.

Interview with Commissioner Joseph F. Friedkin, El Paso, June 2, 1969.

18.

Testimony by Charles W. Kilgore, member of the Imperial County Board of Supervisors, p. 241, unpublished transcript of hearings on Green Card commuters held by Congressman Tunney in California.

19. Letter from Emmett Shockley, Superintendent, Deming Public Schools, Deming, New Mexico, to the author, July 1969.

20. Select Commission, Hearings--Part I--El Paso,op. cit., letter from Daniel Omer, General Counsel, Selective Service, to Charles Gordon, General Counsel,INS, April 10, 1967, p. 149. 21. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, "The Commuter on the United States Mexico Border Staff Report," (Washington, D.C., 1968), p. 11; also, House Judiciary Committee Report of 1963, op. cit., p. 171.

22.

Interviews with draft board officials in Texas and Arizona.

23. Treasury Department, Internal Revenue Service, "Tax Information for Visitors to the United States," Publication 513 (10-68) (Washington, D.C., 1968).

24. "U.S. Tax Guide for Aliens," Publication 519 (10-68) (Washington, D.C., 1968), 9. 29.

VII. Local Variations in Commutation Practices

As it must be abundantly clear by now, the border labor markets vary considerably from city to city. Perhaps it would be useful to review some of these differences, starting at Brownsville and moving west.

There are essentially three kinds of city location arrangements at the border; in the most common, both the American and the Mexican cities are right on the river, as is the case at Brownsville: another has the American city back some distance from the border, such as McAllen, while the Mexican city is at the border; in the third, such as Rio Grande City, the American city is on the border, but the Mexican one is not.

When the cities are next to each other there tends to be more commutation than when they are not; for instance, one can walk (which is important with poverty-stricken workers) from the low-rent area in Matamoros to job opportunities in Brownsville. Brownsville has a farm labor shape-up area, although it is not as busy as the comparable institution at McAllen. Most of the commuters at Brownsville, however, are not farm workers.

The Brownsville crossing point is one of the busiest, having 3,777 crossers, including 2,306 aliens and 1,471 citizens (using here, as we will throughout the chapter the

August 1969 alien count and the 1966 count for citizens). The ratio of citizen to alien commuters was the second high on the border, 42 percent.

The next crossing point, Progresso, had only 82 alien crossers in 1969, and is not located near a major American population center.

Further up the Valley is Hidalgo, the little town at the border some ten miles south of McAllen. The distance between the border and McAllen, a city comparable to Brownsville, probably accounts for the smaller number of commuters. The total number crossing there were 1,063 aliens and 1,398 citizens, this being the only crossing point where the citizens appear to be in the majority. About half of the alien commuters here are engaged in farm work, and the shape-up point, which in fact is the only really active one in the county, is at the end of the bridge. (This causes resident U.S. farm workers to travel almost to Mexico before they can seek farm work in the morning.)

The three crossing points mentioned to date are open 24 hours a day.

Next comes the little ferry at Los Ebanos, which is literally hauled across the river by five sturdy Mexican Nationals, and is owned by a physician in Monterrey.

This

crossing point is open only eight hours a day, which effectively Los Ebanos is a little town

eliminates its use by commuters.

in Texas--the nearest Mexican community is several miles from the river over a bumpy dirt road.

The bridge at Rio Grande City was down during the 1967 survey, but is now open for 11 hours a day, and goes from a point near the center of town to a point a couple of miles from the Mexican twin city. There was no commutation reported here either in 1967 or currently.

The other crossing point in Starr County is at Roma,

which is right on the river, and a stone's throw from Ciudad Miguel Aleman, the Mexican city. There were 165 alien communter reported here, mostly farm workers.

Falcon Heights, the crossing point which is atop the

Falcon Dam, does not have an appreciable commuter work force, though it does have the attraction of being free.

The Laredo crossing is a very busy one, being the bridge between downtown Laredo and downtown Nuevo Laredo; the commuters are numerous, with 3,312 aliens and 1,134 citizens being counted. This is the second busiest crossing point in Texas (second

only to El Paso) and perhaps the city where a commuter

work force is least

needed. Only 312 of the commuters

work on farms, and a great many work in the retail stores of the city. Laredo's extreme poverty has already been noted.

The next two cities, Eagle Pass and Del Rio, offer an interesting contrast. Del Rio, with a 1960 population of 18,617, received only a sixth as many commuters as did

Eagle Pass, with a population of 12,094. Del Rio received 318 citizens and 132 alien commuters, while Eagle Pass accepted 1,106 citizens and 1,968 aliens.

difference?

Why the

In the first place, the city opposite Eagle Pass, Piedras Negras, is considerably larger (48,408) than Villa Acuna, which is the one opposite Del Rio (22,317); secondly, Eagle Pass is on a main highway into the interior of Mexico, while Villa Acuna, until recently, was so isolated from the Mexican interior that one routinely drove to Mexico City by crossing into the United States, driving down the Texas side of the border to Eagle Pass, and then crossing into Mexico again. Thirdly, the agriculture around Del Rio is pastoral, and requires so few farm hands that only two were recorded as crossing in 1967, while Eagle Pass is in the Winter Garden area, and employed 682 alien commuter farm workers in 1967. Finally, Eagle Pass is right on the border, while Del Rio is back from the river by about four miles.

There are just handfuls of commuters at Presidio and Fort Hancock, and our interviewers did not visit these towns. (We did talk to a VISTA Volunteer in Presidio, and in the process of trying to reach him discovered that this out-ofthe-way place has no local government, no local telephone