Lincoln and a Girl Named Brenda

I am trying to write about Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson, yet I keep thinking about a 10-year-old girl named Brenda. Beilenson wants to amend the Constitution--and so, inevitably, my mind wanders to Brenda.

Beilenson is a Democrat from Woodland Hills known for his cerebral manner and independent ways. We met for the first time this week in his Capitol Hill offices. Brenda is the bright-eyed, A-student daughter of an illegal immigrant. We met in September, 1993, at a Pacoima health clinic shortly after Gov. Pete Wilson announced his politically savvy support of Proposition 187.

The congressman and the schoolgirl have a lot in common. Years ago, Beilenson waged an unsuccessful campaign for U.S. Senate. When I met Brenda, she wanted to grow up to be President.

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Beilenson is a Harvard-educated liberal who has spent 33 years in elected office. He is, as one political almanac put it, “one of those politicians for whom raw politics is inherently unpleasant and who, because they would prefer to stay above the fray, sometimes find it difficult to fit in.”

Since redistricting, he has twice won reelection on West Valley and Ventura County turf that seemed ripe for Republicans. The New York Times and Washington Post listed Beilenson as among the most vulnerable Democrats in the House last fall. Yet he prevailed, while many Democrats thought to be more secure fell victim in the GOP sweep of ’94.

Beilenson also survived the sweep of Proposition 187. Like many opponents, he viewed a vote for the denial of health and education benefits to illegal immigrants and their children to be a vote for mandatory truancy, juvenile crime and the spread of illness. But Beilenson couldn’t be dismissed as a bleeding heart, given his proposal to rewrite the 14th Amendment to the Constitution so as to deny United States citizenship to children of illegal immigrants born on U.S. soil.

He has backed such an amendment since 1991, after constituents in two town hall meetings asked how he could defend the fact that illegal immigrants could get welfare benefits if their children were U.S. citizens by birth. Beilenson, who toiled on the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act and considered himself well-versed, was surprised to learn that the constituents were not mistaken.

The 14th Amendment, added to assure full citizenship status for newly freed slaves after the Civil War, simply said “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Illegal immigration, Beilenson points out, wasn’t much of an issue in 1868.

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Citizenship isn’t as tangible as a school, a clinic, an AFDC check. Denying birthright citizenship would raise the practical matter of enforcement. But the social dilemmas and philosophical questions are more daunting.

A 1991 study estimated that 28,800 babies were born to illegal immigrant mothers in Los Angeles County hospitals, and 96,000 statewide--Americans, each and every one. Now, would we really be better off if they weren’t? Would we be creating a vast class of disenfranchised, virtually stateless youth? Would it end illegal immigration--or just guarantee greater trouble down the road?

Most people, I suspect, would want to give it a try. When I first wrote about Brenda, I wondered how Gov. Wilson would have fared in a debate with her--just Brenda, one child to represent the masses of children he would deny education and health benefits. The mail was fast and furious--and all pro-187. Some of it was ugly, most of it reasonably argued the writer’s case: Illegal immigration shouldn’t be rewarded. Deny benefits and they won’t come.

But if Brenda ever debates Wilson or Beilenson, I would refer her to the words of a politician Beilenson admires. We spoke about Abraham Lincoln in a Capitol lounge underneath a portrait of George Washington. Washington and Lincoln, Beilenson mused, would struggle with the telegenic politics of today.

Here’s what Lincoln wrote to a friend in 1855, explaining why he rejected the nativist thinking of the Know-Nothing Party. I first saw it, with its archaic spelling intact, in an New Yorker essay by Sidney Blumenthal.

“How can anyone who abhors the oppression of negroes,” Lincoln wrote, “be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we begin by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it, ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty--to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be take pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.”