All bets are off if you are married to an American. And doing things the right way is broken with the current US immigration system with multi-year to multi-decade wait times for processing and 30-40 different visa classifications. It's like the DMV on steroids.
Immigration here can be simplified, many countries have a point system, based on education, work experience, income, age and health. After an evaluation if you meet or exceed the points threshold you get immediate permanent residency. On work visas, once you have an alien who is here for a year, working for a year and paying taxes for a year, give them a green card, problem solved.
You can cut down the overhead and all the paperwork and reduce the size of the immigration dept and save a ton of money. You grow the population with a tax paying workforce, and stop the brain drain of US educated and trained talent going back to foreign countries and becoming our competitors.
I'm guessing the person is a mexican national/hispanic, in which case the republicans need to work harder to court latino votes, which would be easy on some things like social issues, but the immigration problem needs to be improved soon otherwise you are pushing that voting block to free votes for the democrat column, at least for the ones that become legal US residents.
The illegals don't count since they can't vote. Enforce the minimum wage laws on the books and force I9 compliance for all jobs and you'll greatly reduce that problem.
