Where the Sun Also Rises

A young friend traveled to Europe once and came back with the amazing discovery that Europeans were just like us.

Although the languages were often different, she observed, the needs of the people were similar and their reactions to problems varied only slightly from our own.

She also found the terrain strikingly similar to the terrain in L.A. Parts of the Pyrenees could have been the Santa Monicas, and the oceanfront of the Mediterranean could have been the oceanfront of the Pacific.

The dogs all barked alike, the children screamed and ran when they played, men shouted and fumed in traffic, and everyone slept when they were tired.

What she was fortunate to have discovered at age 12 is that the same sun that warms France warms us, and the stars that shine over Italy shine over America. She had, in effect, discovered the human race.

I use that by way of proceeding into the case of Betty Harvey who, at age 85 and suffering from cancer, is suddenly being called upon to prove her citizenship or face disaster.

Her situation is rooted in the cultural pathology of xenophobia that has sickened the country like an evil virus, turning one against the other in a wave of territorialism more associated with lower animals than humans.

And Betty Harvey doesn’t need another sickness.

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She was born in Great Britain to an English mother and an American father who was working there as a horse trainer. They returned to the U.S. when Betty was not quite 3, assuming, because of her father’s citizenship, that she too was a citizen.

She spent her early years in New Jersey, married there, raised three sons, worked most of her life and retired when she was 62. All of her sons served in the U.S. military: one in Germany after World War II, one in the Korean War and one in the war in Vietnam.

The family moved to L.A. in 1972. Two years later, her husband of 43 years died of an aneurysm. A year later, Betty was diagnosed with colon cancer and since then has undergone surgery four times and has been receiving chemotherapy off and on.

For all of that, however, she remained spry, energetic and positive. Only now is she beginning to wither under the weight of federal regulations.

Betty lives alone in a small, HUD-subsidized apartment in Bell and receives $660 a month in Social Security and SSI payments, plus Medicaid. Up until recently, she supplemented her income cleaning houses but had to give it up.

She nevertheless continued to face life with an “I can do it” attitude until last January when she received notice from the Social Security Administration that her SSI and her Medicaid were in danger.

It was part of an “informational letter” based on passage of last year’s Welfare Reform Act that affected anyone not born in the U.S. Betty Harvey, after all these years, had to prove she was a citizen.

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Armed with birth certificates, death certificates and even the passenger manifest of the ship that brought her to this country 83 years ago, Betty thought this would be an easy task.

One learns, however, that nothing having to do with government is ever easy. After several letters, telephone calls and trips downtown, Betty still hasn’t been able to prove she’s a citizen and doesn’t know why.

“I’m going crazy,” she told me. “It’s too much for me. I feel like crawling into a hole somewhere!”

My call to the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s public affairs officer in L.A. brought the response that they’d help her figure it out. But the best anyone offered later was that she ought to get a green card as a legal immigrant, which she rightly refuses to do.

My call to the Social Security Administration’s public affairs officer in L.A. brought the response that she needn’t worry. When the president signs the new budget into law, it guarantees that those who were receiving SSI payments last August will continue to receive them.

But what Betty seeks is more than money. She wants the government to acknowledge that she is an American citizen, and I think ultimately it will. No one is more of a citizen than Betty Harvey.

In perspective, her case continues to prove how primitive we are in terms of the territorial imperative. We guard our borders like a dog guarding a bone. The little girl whose parents took her to Europe understood immediately that we are one family in the world, one species, one form of soaring, pulsing glorious life.

Too bad we all aren’t as smart as that little girl.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com