Prop. 187 Issue Moves Onto National Stage

In an election year, hot issues rival fresh produce as California’s leading export.

And just as the rest of the country ultimately came to share the tax-slashing spirit of Proposition 13, Wednesday’s House passage of an amendment that would bar illegal immigrants from public schools signals that America as a whole may be picking up California’s obsession with immigration.

In fact, the congressional amendment offered by Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley), which clones a key tenet of California’s Proposition 187, may push immigration to the fore in this year’s presidential election.

A spokesman for the likely Republican nominee, Kansas Sen. Bob Dole, dodged the issue Thursday, saying the Senate majority leader needed more time to focus on the issue, which is not now part of the Senate’s version of the immigration reform bill.

President Clinton’s spokesman branded the Gallegly amendment “nutty” and all but said Clinton would veto any immigration bill that contained it.

But architects of the California initiative--approved more than a year ago but stymied in federal court--rejoiced that a national debate on the issue might bring it quickly to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in its more liberal days ruled that such discrimination was unconstitutional.

“This has tremendous potential. . . . It shows that people now have some guts to deal with a problem that should have been dealt with a long time ago,” said Alan Nelson, the former U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service commissioner who helped craft the California proposition.

Leading constitutional scholars agreed that the court’s current conservative majority might end up overturning a decision formulated by one of the leading liberal justices of that era, now-retired William J. Brennan Jr.

Those who fought Proposition 187, while confident that the congressional amendment ultimately will fail, nonetheless fear that renewed attention to the issue will fuel anti-immigrant sentiment across the nation.

“This raises the level of acceptability of all kinds of overt and virulent immigrant-bashing,” said Martha Jimenez, San Francisco regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a key anti-187 litigant. “It is the worst kind of bullying because it . . . goes after the most innocent and vulnerable population among us.”

For the proposed law’s targets, the news of Proposition 187’s federal incarnation was discouraging. In Los Angeles on Thursday morning, Gladys Fuentes’ voice rose in outrage as she walked her 7-year-old daughter to Logan Street School near downtown.

“Education should not be something political,” said Fuentes, who came to the United States illegally from Honduras four years ago seeking better medical care for a sick son. “We are humans and we keep this country going. . . . Do they want an ignorant citizenry?”

Still, opinion on the question remains deeply divided, even among Latinos, including another Logan second-grade parent who applauded the federal amendment: “Too many of them are coming over and crowding things up,” said the woman, who identified herself only as Maria. “They know everything’s free here and . . . if it wasn’t, they would stay home.”

But underlying the debate is another, more focused, campaign being waged by California’s illegal-immigration opponents and their legislative allies, who hope to overturn the landmark 1982 Supreme Court ruling that made it illegal to deny public education because of immigration status.

In that 5-4 decision--Plyler vs. Doe--the Supreme Court struck down a 1975 Texas law that cut off state funds for schooling illegal immigrants. Acknowledging that education is not a “fundamental right,” the court nonetheless cited its “fundamental role in maintaining the fabric of our society” in concluding that the Texas statute violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

Explaining the majority opinion, Brennan wrote: “It is difficult to understand precisely what the State hopes to achieve by promoting the creation and perpetuation of a subclass of illiterates within our boundaries, surely adding to the problems and costs of unemployment, welfare and crime.”

After passage of Wednesday’s House amendment, however, two leading constitutional scholars, Kenneth L. Karst of UCLA Law School and Akhil Amar of Yale Law School, said the Plyler decision is on increasingly shaky ground.

“This is not the same case,” said Karst, author of “Belonging to America: Equal Citizenship and the Constitution,” which details how the notion of equality developed in the United States.

“The court has been very deferential to Congress in Congress’ regulation of aliens,” Karst said. “The question is whether that kind of deference would extend to this case.”

Changing social conditions and the current court’s conservative cast also could play a role, Amar said.

At the time of the 1982 ruling, Brennan wrote: “There is no evidence in the record suggesting that illegal entrants impose any significant burden on the state’s economy.”

Studies used to promote Proposition 187 maintain that that is no longer true. Gov. Pete Wilson and other Proposition 187 advocates estimated that almost $2 billion is annually expended in educating more than 350,000 undocumented state youngsters--about 5% of the state’s public school enrollment.

Immigrant advocates say those figures are wildly inflated, but anti-illegal immigration activists believe that such “pocketbook” considerations are winning them converts.

“It’s about time Congress said something about all these illegal aliens who are bankrupting our school system,” said Barbara Coe, chairwoman of the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, an Orange County-based umbrella group that was instrumental in getting Proposition 187 on the ballot.

Meanwhile, attorneys working in the anti-187 legal battle vow to expand their fight to include any state that takes up the congressional mandate and passes its own law barring undocumented students from public schools.

“There would be a line at the courthouse” seeking to block any such attempts, said Mark Rosenbaum of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, co-lead counsel in the legal challenge to Proposition 187.

And any one of those cases could be the springboard to the U.S. Supreme Court, observers say.

Even if Plyler were someday overturned, the logistics of enforcing a ban on illegal immigrants would be mind-boggling in a school district such as Los Angeles Unified. The massive school system, rivaled only by New York City in size and diversity, also has consistently maintained a philosophical--and legal--opposition to Proposition 187.

“If identifying these kids is a requirement on the schools, in addition to teaching kids to read and write and compute, I have a real problem with that,” said Los Angeles Supt. Sid Thompson. “But I also question the philosophy of saying a bunch of youngsters . . . in our backyard are not worth educating.”

In the weeks leading up to Proposition 187’s November 1994 passage, thousands of Los Angeles students walked out of school in anger. On Thursday, many said they would do it again to protest the federal measure.

At some schools, the post-187 walkouts left scars in the form of heightened racial tensions. Such was the case at Leuzinger High School in Lawndale, where on election day, hundreds of students climbed the fences to join peers from a neighboring school.

Fights broke out among Latino and African American students, some of them gang rivals, and the unrest continues. More than 40 Leuzinger students were suspended last month after a brawl.

“It was really vicious,” recalled senior Wendy Cedeno, 17, of the 1994 rioting. “It will probably happen again” if the House measure becomes law.

Their eyes flashing with teenage indignation, students at other schools searched for words to describe what they see as the injustice of exclusion based on immigration status.

“We have papers, but we have family and friends that do not,” said Marta Donis, a senior at Belmont High School whose family emigrated from Guatemala a decade ago. “It’s sad because they came here for a better life, a better education, and this would just close the door in their faces.”

For Virginia Tirado, who attends school across the city at Van Nuys High, the political and legal debate is intensely personal. She is an illegal immigrant who came from Mexico 10 years ago with her family.

After Proposition 187 passed, “the people that were born here started calling us wetbacks,” she said. “They would say, ‘We’re going to call the immigration on you.’ ”

The politicians, Tirado said, “don’t know what it’s like to be illegal. . . . I would like them to know how it feels to be told, ‘You don’t belong here.’ I would like them to know what it’s like to go somewhere to try to be someone.”

Times staff writers Henry Weinstein, John Broder, Jose Cardenas, Janet Hook, Maria La Ganga and correspondents Tracy Johnson and Susan Steinberg contributed to this story.