Who is to Blame for Illegal Immigration?

These are my opinions of who is to blame for the illegal immigrant problem in the United States.

I feel that the illegal immigrant themselves is the main person to blame. Some will tell you that they come here to better their lives. Others to avoid political persecution in their country. Sometimes their reason is even to avoid criminal prosecution. There are also the ones that will even tell you that they applied for a visa and got tired of waiting. No matter what the reason is, they and they alone chose to enter this country illegally. No one made them cross the border. They chose to pay someone $500 to hide them in the back of a truck or they ran across the border avoiding the border patrol. They had every opportunity to apply for a visa. Our government restricts its Visas to 40,000 a year. These Visas are supposed to be given to people who have a certain job skill. The people who obtain a visa have to pay a fee of $4,000. They go through a rugged background check. When they do this background check, if a person has a criminal record, depending on the crime, they might be denied entry into our country. Considering how hard it is to get a visa and the cost of said Visa, and also considering there are no fines for entering illegally, I can somewhat understand why they do it. However I don't feel it justifies what they have done. If that were to be the case, then why shouldn't every American citizen who is down on their luck, or who works very hard but can never seem to make enough money to have a nice house, a nice car, and so on, be able to break the law to obtain a better life? Some people would argue that there's a difference because of the living conditions in the places that the illegal immigrants are coming from. It is sad that things are bad where they are, but their government and the people themselves should try to make living conditions better. There are problems in our own country with homelessness, unemployment, and poor living conditions also.