Homeland Security on Tuesday proposed a massive increase in fees paid by immigrants, saying it needs to sweat nearly $2 billion more per year out of migrants and the families and companies seeking to sponsor them in order to keep up with its workload.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that handles legal immigration requests, said the brunt of the increases will fall on those applying for work-based visas. The agency’s humanitarian mission, including asylum seekers and those who seek protection as victims of crimes, will not pay anything for their visas.
The money will go to hire thousands of new officers to process applications and to cover pay raises, technology upgrades and better customer service.
Some money will also go toward the Biden administration’s plans to deliver faster processing of refugees and of illegal immigrants who jump the border and make claims of asylum.
“In addition to improving customer service operations and managing the incoming workload, USCIS must continue to fulfill our growing humanitarian mission, upholding fairness, integrity and respect for all we serve,” said Ur M. Jaddou, the agency’s director.
The proposal starts a 60-day period where the public can submit comments and the agency evaluates those before finalizing the fee schedule.
USCIS is supposed to propose new fees every couple of years, but the last increase came in 2016. The Trump administration’s attempt to increase fees in 2020 was blocked by federal judges who ruled that Homeland Security wasn’t properly organized at the time, so its fee proposal was likely invalid.
That case was brought by immigrant-rights advocates who complained the Trump increases were too steep and fell too heavily on humanitarian cases. The fee to naturalize would have risen from $640 to $1,160 for online applications, with an additional $10 for a paper application.
Under the Biden proposal, the naturalization fee would rise $35. The total would be $760, though that would include an $85 fee for processing biometric data, which is currently required but paid separately.
Ms. Jaddou said USCIS will keep fee waivers intact, rejecting another Trump administration move to try to limit the number of people who don’t have to pay anything.
USCIS is rare among federal agencies in that it’s almost entirely funded by fees paid by applicants. The theory is that immigrants and those asking for them should pay their own way, rather than have the system be a burden to taxpayers.
But USCIS’s budget has been out of whack for years as the agency strains to handle the surge of humanitarian cases, which the agency generally doesn’t charge for.
During the depths of the pandemic, when cross-border travel was severely restricted, the agency’s income plummeted and it flirted with massive furloughs.
It has since turned to Congress for an infusion of taxpayer money.
Ms. Jaddou said more will be needed in the future to eliminate the backlog that developed. But she said the fee increases will at least manage to break even on the future flow of new applications.
Under its current fees, the agency figures it would collect $3.28 billion in application fees this year, not including an additional $1.2 billion in “premium processing” fees.
If the new proposal takes effect, that would rise to $5.2 billion in application fees, or $6.4 billion with the premium processing fees added.
That works out to an increase of more than 50% in total application fees.
Those looking to bring in guest workers would pay heavily, with the petition to hire a seasonal worker more than doubling to $1,090 for an agriculture worker and $1,080 for a nonagriculture worker.
Registering to be part of the lottery for high-skilled H-1B workers would cost $215, up from $10.
As part of its proposal, USCIS said it will get tough on applicants who pay by credit card, then try to stop the payments by disputing the charges.
The agency said it’s seen “a sizable increase” in people trying to do that.
“Because credit card companies usually withdraw the fee in the case of disputes, abuse of the credit card dispute process could have negative fiscal effects on USCIS. Therefore, DHS is proposing that fees paid to USCIS by credit card are not subject to a chargeback by the issuing financial institution,” the agency said in its proposal.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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