Your son-in-law can file an immigrant petition for his wife any time, regardless of the length of time she spent in the U.S. without legal status. Usually, falling out of status makes it very difficult, if at all possible, to adjust status after an immigrant petition gets approved. The law, however, makes an exception for spouses of U.S. citizens: an alien who entered the U.S. legally can adjust status (i.e. receive a green card) on the basis of an approved immigrant petition filed by the U.S. citizen spouse, no matter how much time the alien was in the U.S. without legal status. Your daughter and her husband would have to file a packet of several forms with USCIS: Form I-130; Form I-485; Form I-864; Form G-325 for each of them; Form I-765; and Form I-131. All these forms and instructions for each of them can be downloaded from uscis.gov/forms; carefully following the instructions, your daughter and son-in-law should be able to prepare the package. They will need about $1500 for filing fees. It appears from your description of the situation that they have rather small income. Your son-in-law will have to file Form I-864 Affidavit of Support showing income no less than $29,437 ($34,462 after the birth of the third child). If he does not make that much, he would have to file Form I-864 anyway AND find someone to be your daughter's co-sponsor. Any U.S. citizen or permanent resident can be a co-sponsor (there are no kinship requirements) if he/she can independently show sufficient income or assets. "Independently" means that co-sponsor's income must be counted separately, without adding the income of your son-in-law. The income guidelines are at http://www.uscis.gov/files/form/i-864p.pdf To determine which guideline applies, count the co-sponsor's own family plus 1. If the paperwork will be done right, the rest should not present any problems.
Answered on Apr 24th, 2013 at 1:09 AM