To bad no one has a rights to come to America. I have a friend from England who just became a citizen, it didn't take him 7 years. Once he decided to do it was done in 6 months.
Cheap labor, well that because Americans think they are to good to do good to do such a menial task. Maybe in the .gov checks stopped coming a bunch of unskilled Americans could get out there and do it. Yeah then all the arguments about not earning a living wage, well the Mexicans seem to make do.
Was your friend sponsored by a company? That often shortens the process drastically.
I know a lot of people who have come to the US on student Visas and it truly took years to become "legal"
Well, the issue is that US citizens are subject to a labor rate. Now, if you completely changed the idea of minimum wage and allowed for US citizens to work for much much much lower wages, then yes, those people would be able to do the menial shit jobs, but those are laws that are extremely unlikely to be repealed anytime soon.
So we deal with what we have.
Cheap illegal workers coming over to do better than they would at home and it becomes a win win situation.
The illegals aren't taking anyones jobs that would work those jobs in the first place.
Now the migration of jobs across to texas. Well, that's not good, but has been on-going since 1996 or so. NAFTA is 20 years old now.
Also, let's keep in mind that many of the jobs have come back from that initial send off as the product and reliability that came from Mexico was much lower and people stopped buying the products.
I expect Carrier Heating and Air will be returning before too long as their product will start to suffer.
Sending manufacturing and off-shoring other services is hardly new. It was tried in the 80s, 90s, 2000s... It typically (not always) returns.