To negotiate the legal and bureaucratic maze that constitutes our immigration system, you need:

a) to know how to read. Poverty and illiteracy go hand in hand. People seeking to better their lives by picking strawberries or cleaning toilets are likely to fall into the non-reader group.

b) to know how to read US Federal English, a foreign language for many native speakers of American English. This dialect sometimes results in a deadening of the brain due to prepositional phrase overdose and toxic levels of -tion nouns. For examples, see US Federal tax forms.

c) access to immigration information. The applicant must therefore have either unimpeded access to a US Consulate or unimpeded access to the internet. If you are seeking a low-income job, chances of the latter are slim. Unless you live in a major population center, or a tourist haven or industrial center for Americans, ditto the former. If you live in a nation that is politically oppressive but with which the US seeks better relations (cf. China), forget about walking into the American consulate.

d) several years' worth of free time to wait your turn, unless you are from a nation with a very small immigration rate, because there is a per-country immigration quota. If you are immigrating from Norway, whose population and rate of emigration is low, your chances of getting a green card are nearly 100%. If you are from a nation that has a larger population, like China or Mexico, which also incidentally have higher incentives to emigrate, you'll be on a list that may be 4 or 5 years long. If your family is starving, you will not wait until you've buried a few. You will take a chance on illegal immigration because another country's paperwork is less morally important than your responsibility to your family.

For more information on how easy it is to immigrate to the US, try to decipher the US Department of State Bureau of Consular Affairs Visa Bulletin. Then imagine trying to figure out when you can legally apply for a visa if you are a foreigner with limited real English, possibly desperate circumstances, and no experience filling out US income tax forms, which this sounds like without the dollar signs.

For plainer information, visit here.

The reason more people don't apply legally is because we make it so damn hard to do so. Educated people can negotiate the maze, and will be able to find help. That's on purpose, because those are the people we "want". Even then, as we have seen with the massive expulsion of young Muslim men here on student visas, it's possible to get bad advice from the government itself concerning visa status and wind up expelled from the country because of political circumstances. They weren't all terrorists.

People who come here because they can't afford to live where they are have no one to speak up for them. Yet those princely $8.50/hr. jobs are just waiting, with American employers willing to look the other way...

It's easy to criticize the poor for being dirty when we don't have to fill out 12 forms in triplicate and wait 3 years to get a chance to buy a bar of soap, the way they do.