*Indecent proposal*
Hi, I'm going to weigh in here. This will be fun.
Background: successfully filed for wife's green card in early 2013. Conditional permanent resident status granted mid-2013; currently building package for release of conditional status (actual permanent residency).
My opinion: the risk to reward is too high. They will have to build real and legally binding connections (joint bank accounts, joint insurance, lease/mortgage/utilities, etc.), and interview at least once, possibly more. Then, if/when he is granted conditional status, they will have to go back and re-validate their status two years later. If the legal appearances are not constructed well enough, there will be awkward questions. The initial interview looks fairly deep - not just financial entanglements, but evidence of actual cohabitation and shared life experiences - and if anything looks sketchy, they put the brakes on the process to look even deeper. If you say she's not ballsy enough to pull it off... she probably isn't.
Also relevant: two years is NOT enough to complete the process. It can take a couple of months post-wedding to compile enough supporting documentation to file the package; it takes a bare minimum of three months to get approved (often 6+); and only
then does the two-year conditional clock start ticking. In our case, where
literally everything went absolutely right, and the filing-to-approval time was
below the theoretical minimum*, it was still almost five months from marriage to green card. So even if she decides to do it, she needs to allow more like three years for shit to go wrong, RFIs to come back, and all kinds of other surprises. There are a million sites out there for hopeful immigrants detailing the horror stories that can and do happen, where the process runs into
years just to grant CPR status and start that two-year count.
*Most sources indicate 3-4 months is the minimum time that should be allowed from filing to approval, and with HEAVY caveats that any number of things can add substantially to that. We pulled it off in just under 3 months by going full OCD on the submittal package and lucking out on biometric and final interview appointment timing. This followed 2 months of prep actions like waiting for our stamped marriage certificate, merging our finances, changing her IDs, generally accumulating evidence of a marriage in good faith, and getting her required physical and shots.All that said, if you promise to keep in touch with her and report on all the hilarity that ensues, I totally, completely, 100%, favor her doing this.