LEGALLY come to the United States and pay literally no taxes on your income. Their are plenty of states like Texas and Nevada where you can live with a low cost of living and make it happen.
Do you have any insight on this? Asking for a friend...really.
My friend is currently working in the US (legally) on a J-1 visa. She would like to emigrate permanently, legally. As far as I can tell, she can't. She is from Colombia, and has a lot of enthusiasm and works very hard. She does not have any skills that would allow her to get a H1-b visa. There are literally (as far as I can tell) no legal ways for her to emigrate to the US. Her choices are to stay illegally, or go home and never come back. I would love it if you could point to some other options (and maybe it is different for Germans than it is for South Americans).
Also, people in Texas and Nevada pay a lot of tax. Let's not kid about that.
You are probably right about your friend, barring her falling in love with and marrying an American Citizen. If she has no close family with status in the US (parents, basically... although brothers and sisters are an option, the petition takes many, many years to become current) she will not qualify for a family-based immigration petition, which leads to permanent residency. If she were not Colombian, she might have the option of applying for a visa through the Diversity Visa Lottery program... but that is only an option for countries that send small numbers of immigrants to the US through normal channels, so Colombia is not included in the program.
Also, depending on what kind of a J-1 visa she is on, she may be legally required to live and work in her country of origin for 2 years before qualifying for a work or immigrant visa. (This would be written on her physical visa, as being either subject or not subject to Section 212(e), or "the two year rule" depending on how they wrote the annotation. )
H1-B is actually NOT an immigrant visa, it's a non-immigrant visa leading to a longer-term legal status to work in the US. She would need to have skills and be petitioned by her employer, have skills, etc. There are other options for long-term working status in the US, including H2-B and H2-A visas (temporary non-skilled and agricultural labor, respectively. The 'temporary' can last from 6 months to 3 years, with the proper paperwork) but would need to be sponsored by an employer for that job, and cannot change her job while she's on the visa. She could also investigate a student visa in the US, if she can fund her studies and has a legitimate reason for studying in the US.
Claiming refugee status without being able to back up a sincere and creditable threat in her country of origin is a really, really BAD idea. It can make you actually or de facto ineligible for other visas, including visiting visas, to the US, possibly permanently.
But yeah. Our immigration system is not set up to permit easy migration of people outside of set categories. I've had some immigration authorities tell me "Oh, there's a visa for everyone..." but that is really not true.