CALIFORNIA COMMENTARY : Still They Come; There Is No Choice : Immigration: U.S. law is no match for the ‘push factor’--the human impulse and moral imperative to find a means of survival.

We have to turn them away. Since December we have been at capacity. Men without homes, immigrants without papers, line the pews and sleep on the floor of our church. We cannot accommodate more than 100 of them. The other evening, I turned away Octavio from Zacatecas and Mario from Guatemala City. Many like them keep coming and will continue to do so.

We are in the fourth year of the landmark Immigration Reform and Control Act designed to keep the Octavios and the Marios from entering the United States. It has been a stunning failure. All reliable sources indicate that undocumented men, women and children are crossing our 2,000-mile border with Mexico in record numbers. The numbers, in fact, virtually match those that preceded and precipitated the passage of IRCA in 1986.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service officials and congressional proponents of the law scramble to put the best face possible on this legislative failure. As a corrective, the INS offers additional Border Patrol agents, the installation of new barriers and lights and a better document verification system for employers. The legislation gave Congress the option, which is now operative, to repeal employer sanctions if they proved unworkable. Congress has refused, despite the General Accounting Office report of “widespread discrimination” by employers in their hiring practices. Congressional supporters insist that the law will eventually work, even as all evidence suggests otherwise.

Nothing has worked to stop or even slow down this mass migration. To be sure, the law’s threat to employers has made life more difficult for the immigrant, but that has not made anyone crossing the border think twice. The escalation of arrests around the main crossing at San Ysidro--up to 1,500 a day--has merely forced the undocumented to shift their points of entry, not to abandon their quest. Mean-spirited, anti-immigrant campaigns, like the gathering of hundreds of cars on the border to shine their headlights into the Mexican sector, in no way touches the hearts of those ready to chance passage through the mountains and ravines every night. We long ago pulled up the welcome mat and threw it away, but our neighbors still walk right in.

The great failure of IRCA was to criminalize a moral and human compulsion. Pope John Paul II maintains that anyone who is unable to provide for his family has a moral obligation to go to a country where that can be accomplished. For the people of Latin America and the Caribbean, that country is the United States. No law, no hiring protocol, no amount of border vigilance, no penalty is a match for what compels these people to come to this country: survival. Abject poverty, political instability, torture and other abuses push thousands across our border. There is not a deterrent imaginable that equals the conditions that force their migration.

With IRCA, we made it illegal to pursue the basic human right to work, to seek refuge from persecution and simply to live. The powers, conditions and desires that propel Mexicans and Central Americans into this country are so fundamental, so vast, that no action, legislative or other-wise, can discourage this flight.

In our misguided rush to address the “invasion” of “illegals” in the mid-1980s, we gave scant attention to the “push factor.” We neglected to ask why so many would flee their land of birth and risk all,even death, to be on this side of the border. Were we to do this, we would recognize the futility of legislating against such a powerful drive.

The time, energy and money we have spent penalizing those perpetrators of the crime of survival would be more effectively spent in addressing the causes of their flight. A policy of helping them to survive productively in their own lands would be more sensible than merely, and ineffectively, telling them that they are not welcome here.

Octavio from Zacatecas, Mario from Guatemala City, Roberto from El Salvador and hundreds of others have had to be turned away from the bursting walls of our tiny church. But their compatriots will still keep coming to the United States. They have no choice, really. We do: We can apply our nation’s abundant resources to correcting the poverty and political oppression that makes emigration necessary for so many in the Third World. And we can stop criminalizing the human and moral imperative of survival.