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The scene is played out in the San Jacinto Plaza of El Paso, Texas (pop. 381,500), in the dawn hours of most Mondays. Sedans cruise slowly around the square, their drivers eying clusters of young women. Every so often, one of the women is beckoned from the sidelines. Deals are struck and the cars pull away.

The object of this ritual is not prostitution and the women are not harlots. They are illegal immigrants (known euphemistically these days as "undocumented aliens") who have crossed the Rio Grande from neighboring Juarez, Mexico, looking for work as maids. Their usual rate: around $25 a week. Because of its proximity to Ju?z, El Paso is the second largest crossing point for undocumented aliens in the U.S. The largest is Chula Vista, Calif., which shares part of its sewerage system with neighboring Tijuana. Aliens have been known to crawl through the common drainage pipes to reach the U.S.

Undocumented aliens are the most shadowy portion of the Hispanic community. By federal estimates, there are 8.2 million of them in the U.S. Other estimates range from as low as 3 million to as high as 12 million. As many as 90% of the total are Hispanics. A million more are suspected of joining them every year.

Whatever the exact numbers, there is little doubt that the tide of undocumented Hispanic aliens has reached flood stage. Many thousands have come from Central and South American countries like Guatemala, Colombia and Ecuador, but about 90% are Mexican. On foot, by air or in autos, they filter across the 2,000-mile-long southern U.S. border. Last year nearly 1 million illegal entrants were apprehended and deported by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. But, admits Los Angeles Police Officer Antonio Amador, "the only way we're going to stop them is to build a Berlin Wall."

Behind the mass influx are some stark economic figures: half of Mexico's 18 million-member labor force is unemployed; a devalued peso has sent prices there spiraling; the country's 3.5% population growth is one of the world's highest. Says Border Patrolman Michael S. Williams: "They're starving to death down there."

Typical of them is Jos?., 33, who as a tenant farmer in an isolated area of Mexico's Jalisco state could earn no more than $500 in a good year. Now he works in a metals factory near Los Angeles and brings home $160 a week, counting overtime pay. In six years he has saved $2,000. Says Jos?"I love Mexico. It is very beautiful, but you can't live there. Coming to the U.S. was a question of economics."

After crossing the border three times near Yuma, Ariz., and being apprehended each time, Jos?aid a "coyote" (smuggler) $200 to ferry him across. After a year in Los Angeles, he paid another coyote $400 to smuggle in his wife and three of their six children. Eight months later he sent for the other three, at a cost of $250. Now the family?including two children born in the U.S.?occupies a sweltering one-bedroom barrio apartment, in which every available piece of furniture doubles as a bed. Even such cramped quarters are an improvement over what would be available in Mexico. Pointing at his twelve-year-old daughter, Jos?ays: "If we were in Mexico, she would be working in the fields by now."

Many of the undocumented aliens live in a shadowy netherworld, fearful that anyone could betray them to the INS. They are preyed upon by coyote racketeers who take their fee and then skip out on the smuggling assignment; by shyster notaries who have made fortunes providing them with worthless documents; and by employers who call the INS to round up the illegals just before payday.

On top of all that, they are deeply resented. Some labor unions have asked for tougher enforcement measures against them, arguing that they take jobs away from legal residents and undercut wage rates. In Texas, local school boards have refused to provide free public schooling to children who cannot prove permanent legal immigrant status for themselves or their parents. Even fellow Hispanics often turn undocumented workers over to the INS. Says Jos? Ramiriz of the Chicane Training Center in Houston: "There are mixed feelings about the undocumented in the Mexican-American community. The feeling is that they're receiving services that should be going to [legal] Mexican Americans."

Some federal authorities argue differently. A 1975 Department of Labor study estimated that while 77% of illegal aliens had Social Security taxes withheld from their paychecks and 73% had federal income taxes deducted, less than 1% were on welfare and less than 8% had children in school. The study's conclusion: illegal aliens provide a net benefit to the U.S. economy.

They also fill many jobs that nobody else wants, even in a period of high unemployment. Farmers near Presidio, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, learned that lesson while cooperating with a local INS crackdown on undocumented laborers from the nearby Mexican town of Ojinaga. The growers took out newspaper advertisements requesting 4,000 domestic agricultural workers at the minimum farm wage of $2.20 an hour. They got 300 replies. Finally the growers were allowed by the INS to import the help they needed ?from Ojinaga.

Concerned about the ever increasing numbers of illegals pouring into the U.S., Jimmy Carter has proposed an unorthodox solution: an amnesty for any undocumented alien who arrived in the U.S. before 1970 and could prove it. Those who arrived after that date would be granted five-year temporary residence status, and at the end of that time would be asked to leave. A number of Congressmen object to leave. A number of Congressmen object to Carter's policy on the grounds that it is unworkable, or even undesirable, and have stalled it in the Senate Immigration Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee. The amnesty may never see daylight.

But the President has succeeded in making one notable change. In 1977 he appointed the first Hispanic commissioner in the history of the INS, Leonel Castillo, 39, a former Houston politician?and the grandson of an illegal immigrant. Castillo has unofficially endorsed the establishment of private counseling centers where illegal aliens can go for help without being turned over to immigration officers; recast the INS' four detention centers as "service processing centers"; and even, in El Paso, provided thousands of dollars worth of soccer equipment for detainees. All this has irked the hard-pressed, 4,000-member U.S. Border Patrol, which would rather see more money spent on helicopters, sensing equipment and manpower to stem the tide of illegals. In an El Paso Border Patrol office hangs a cartoon showing a group of bedraggled, scrape-wrapped aliens who have crossed the Rio Grande. On it, someone has scrawled the caption: "Castillo's cousins."

Sooner rather than later, Congress is going to have to confront the problem of halting the flow of illegals. Meanwhile, there are millions of legal Hispanics in the U.S., and it no longer matters whether they or their ancestors arrived as wetbacks splashing across the ankle-deep Rio Grande or as political refugees in fishing boats from Cuba, or in the trunks of coyote cars or the staterooms of proud galleons. What does matter is that they?and their fellow Americans?now face another problem: writing a new chapter in the perpetually unfinished story of American pluralism. Both sides will undoubtedly have ample reason to recall that in U.S. politics, representation by ethnic population is not handed out gratis, but must be fought for and won. The same goes for many of the other advantages that Hispanics are likely to demand.

"No, we haven't arrived yet," says Graciela Olivarez, director of the federal Community Services Administration and the first woman graduate of the University of Notre Dame Law School. "But never before have we had so many Hispanic assistant secretaries [in the Federal Government], or people in every Government department. We don't have someone on the Supreme Court yet, or a Cabinet Secretary, but we'll have that to look forward to in the next go-round." Olivarez's confidence is just one more proof, if another were needed, that Hispanic Americans will be pressing for many more go-rounds in the years to come.

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