The issue of illegal immigration, the reasons why there were so many and what caused the poverty they were escaping is more complex than most people understand or are willing to learn about. Truthfully, many don't want to know because it would undercut their feeling of righteousness when they say we should just deport all these people. Like so many things the poverty these immigrants faced in their home countries was largely caused by big American corporations getting NAFTA passed and signed by Clinton and that treaty bankrupted a large percentage of the family farms of Mexico which had successfully supported those families for decades. Their system of price supports was eliminated under NAFTA and barriers to grain from factory farms in the United States were taken down. That bankrupted the farmers who then went to the cities along the border and got jobs in the American factories there. Unfortunately though, most of those jobs were then outsourced to China leaving these people homeless and jobless. Were any of us in their shoes we would very likely have done exactly what they did; come into the United States to look for work so that they could send money to their starving families in Mexico.
What our real problem is isn't the illegal immigrants, it's the corporations that control our governments for their own advantage and to the detriment of the citizens of both the US and Mexico.

"Sorry I pasted the wrong exerpt..
For some reason I thought NAFTA meant jobs moving TO Mexico FROM the USA."

That was my whole point, the whole problem is more complicated that most folks want to admit. Many of these people were farmers or from farming families when NAFTA went into force, they lived on family farmed owned for generations. NAFTA allowed the big companies to undercut their prices for corn, etc. and put them out of business, at the same time American corporations were building the factories you remember and so they left the farms, went where the factories were and got jobs only to then be displaced when those jobs were outsourced to China. That left them without the farm and without the jobs so they came here to work doing many things but especially construction work. OUr immigration dept. was told not to enforce immigration laws during the housing bubble, remember "they're only coming here to do jobs Americans won't do?" Then the bubble burst and the jobs disappeared and many are actually today returning to Mexico, we have net negative immigration today. Also today, INS is actually enforcing the laws against employers to a much larger extent than during the Bush years.