One thing Pat Buchanan's candidacy in the March 26 California Republican presidential primary is sure to do is measure which card is more appealing -- the race card or the class card. Immigrants make up a quarter of the state's workforce. However much bashing corporations appeals to them, they're unlikely to support a candidate who also blames them for California's economic ills. PNS commentator Dick Meister, a freelance columnist in San Francisco, has covered labor and political issues for more than three decades.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Pat Buchanan, who has relied heavily on working class votes for whatever success he's had in other states, may find it much harder to win them in California's Republican presidential primary March 26.

In a state where Hispanic and Asian immigrants make up about one-fourth of the state's workforce, Pat the corporation-basher and Pat the immigrant-basher may wind up canceling each other out.

Although many Hispanic and Asian workers undoubtedly support Buchanan's bashing of corporations for causing workers' severe economic ills, many nevertheless object to his race card -- blaming immigrants or "Jose's" for those same ills.

Immigrant opposition could prove formidable. Immigrants already been the most politically active if not militant of California's working people in recent years and are spearheading the growing revitalization of the state's labor movement.

Immigrant organizers have waged markedly successful unionization drives among their fellow immigrants who hold many of the jobs in the ever-growing service industries that now dominate the California economy, particularly in hospitals, hotels and restaurants.

The other success stories are many -- the United Farm Workers union winning dozens of new contracts, thousands of Hispanic janitors and construction workers in Southern California winning contracts after lengthy and widely supported strikes, Asian garment workers statewide fighting successfully for union rights, hundreds of thousands of dollars in back pay and an end to decades-old sweatshop conditions. Immigrants have done all that and more.

Hispanics have been particularly successful politically. They've joined together to help elect Hispanic -- and working class-conscious -- congressional representatives, state legislators and school board and city council members, mayors and other officials in cities throughout California.

This is not to say that all immigrant workers will necessarily oppose Buchanan. Even the notably anti-immigrant Gov. Pete Wilson has won some Asian and Hispanic support through his conservative position on social issues and appeal to the upwardly-mobile sensibilities of middle class immigrants.

Buchanan's social conservatism, especially his uncompromising opposition to abortion, could similarly win him some immigrant support.

Non-immigrant workers generally are better off economically than immigrants, but they also are feeling great pain and are highly vulnerable to Pat the immigrant basher as well as Pat the corporation basher.

Like most other workers around the country, their productivity has increased steadily, but half or more of them haven't had a pay raise in 15 years, accounting for inflation.

What's more, as Secretary of Labor Robert Reich told a gathering in San Francisco recently, "their health care benefits are drying up, their pensions vanishing. The rich are getting ahead, but most of the rest of us are getting nowhere. In the space of a single generation, the phrase 'job security' has become a quaint phrase of a bygone era."

Corporate downsizing and the closing and moving of plants and factories have wiped out thousands of California jobs over the past five years, even as corporate profits, the compensation of executives and the returns to stockholders have soared.

At least six of every 100 California workers are unemployed. Thousands of others can find only temporary or part-time jobs that generally pay far less than full-time work and provide no fringe benefits, no security, no rights, no possibility even of promotion to better jobs. More than two million must work at or near the state's poverty-level minimum wage of $4.25 an hour.

What's needed is an increase in the minimum wage, health care for low-income families, job training for laid-off workers, strengthening and strict enforcement of the job safety laws and other reforms. Buchanan ignores or opposes such essential reforms -- he has come out against the California initiative to raise the minimum wage -- in favor of cutting off immigration, raising tariffs sky high and otherwise assuming an isolationist posture to ease workers' economic woes.

California workers have, of course, been swayed by such arguments before. Two years ago, many working people helped re-elect Gov. Wilson, who ran on a similar platform. Despite the AFL-CIO's formal opposition, many workers also voted to deny essential services to immigrants by supporting State Proposition 187, which won by a large majority.

The one thing Buchanan's candidacy is sure to do in California is spotlight which holds greater voter appeal -- the class card or the race card.