The so-called "Immigration Reform" bill won't help your girlfriend. It will only help those who come here illegally gain a pseudo-legal status which keeps them from being entitled to the same legal protections and benefits (at the least in the work place) as those who came here according to the rules. If your girlfriend is here legally, she will, in fact, have nothing change for her with this atrocity's passage. If she becomes illegal, she will lose certain protections, but in the process, she might become more hire-able as employers will legally be able to employ her second-class immigrant-status person without having to provide Obamacare coverage, without having to obey minimum wage laws, without having to even really concern themselves with most other regulations governing benefits, pay, and possibly (it's not yet clear) workplace safety.
This isn't a "pro-immigration" nor even "pro-immigrant" bill. This is a bill designed to import a poor underclass to serve initially as a group that can be paid less than their legal (and citizen) counterparts, and then to provide a campaign issue for those who support big government to point out how inhumane that status is. They'll champion passing new laws overturning all the supposedly-tough provisions, granting all in this nation exactly what they already have: full access to our government benefits.
Its supposedly-tough border enforcement measures are really just proposals; the language of the bill expressly allows the Secretary in charge of INS to decide whether or not to use the funds as outlined in the bill, and only requires her to have a plan saying how she'd do it if she chose to before the amnesty provisions kick in. Given that this Secretary has - with her boss, Obama's, full backing - stated that she thinks the border is plenty secure, we know nothing will be enforced. In fact, we know she will act to prevent anybody from working towards it being more secure, as the Fed. has actively hamstringed any State-level efforts to protect their borders. (Whether you think the States' methods were right or wrong, you cannot deny that this administration has put them in a Catch-22: if the administration doesn't want to protect the border, they have no recourse at the State level.)
This bill is a hideously racist piece of cynical abuse, designed to transform illegal hispanic immigrants (and any others they can rope in; I suppose it's not "racist" so much as "classist") into a permanent, dependent underclass. There is an aspect of our political spectrum that cannot survive without poor, dependent people living on an effective plantation, and this bill is designed to feed that machine by creating new victims to be exploited on one side and then exploited by self-proclaimed champions on the other, the one to evade economy-killing policies and the other to use that evasion to justify still more such policies combined with a grab to get votes (legal or not!) from the new permanent underclass.
And in the process, it will only do as the 1986 law did, and encourage more illegal immigration, making a mockery of those immigrants who, like your girlfriend, followed the rules.
What we NEED is a Legal Immigrants' Rights Defense Act. This act would enforce border security and deny all benefits and support to anybody who is here illegally. It would give those who are caught but who have legal citizen children (due to the "born in the USA" part of our Constitution) the right to put their child up for adoption (thus not denying the child his rights as a US citizen) or take him with them (and foresake his citizenship, thus not breaking up the family), but it would still deport them. Why do this? To protect the rights of the LEGAL immigrants from being abused and trampled by law-breakers. It would and should also look at our approval process. It's old and creaky in this modern era, and needs a revamping. We need to have more high-tech research done on applicants to accelerate the process, and we need better tracking mechanisms so we can be more welcoming to more people without diminishing our security. Protections already extend to legal immigrants that make them, on a social and legal-protections level, pretty much as secure as US citizens. What we need are new provisions with hard-set requirements to protect our legal immigrants from unlawful and unfair competition for jobs, benefits, or what-have-you from illegals.
This bill now in the Senate won't do this. This bill now in the Senate will at best mock and at worst paint with a brush of resentment your girlfriend. She is, by the way this bill is written, an idiot for obeying our laws rather than coming here illegally. She will, too, be viewed with unfair suspicion because of this law, which paints all immigrants with the same brush and treats illegals as a protected underclass that nevertheless has no protection. Cultural resentment is inevitable, and will (by the design of the very campaigns used to promote the amnesty act: that is, the accusation that those who oppose amnesty are anti-immigrant, implying that illegals are no different than legals) harm legal immigrants' standing in society's eyes by making them look no different than the criminals who broke our laws to get here.
So, if you love and respect your girlfriend, and you want something that will help her, don't support this bill. It will, at best, do nothing to help her. It can, at worst, put her behind illegals in many unofficial waiting lines and harm her ability to be treated with respect by American society. This bill is destructive to the interests of all save the ruling class in this country, and seeks to improve the ruling class's lot by importing a still lower-class (and potentially lowering, by its inducements, currently legal immigrants to that lower class) for them to exploit.
