News Update - September 26, 2009

By Alan Lee, Esq.^†‡

U.S.C.I.S. Wants to Raise Application Fees Again!!

The Los Angeles Times reports that the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services is considering increasing fees in the next year. Applications for citizenship and skilled worker visas did not meet the agency’s projections and a $118-million shortfall in agency revenue is expected.

Fees were just recently increased in 2007, when citizenship applications jumped from $400 to $675. The Washington Post notes that applications had spiked before the 2007 fee hike, motivated in part by applicants’ wish to avoid higher fees, and in part because applicants wished to vote in the 2008 presidential elections. In 2008, applications for citizenship fell off, but the flood of applications in 2007 and the country’s unanticipated economic decline may have spurred agency officials to over-project application rates for 2008.

While the USCIS is fee-funded agency, using application fees to pay for employees and processing, it has recently requested $206 million to pay for fees for asylum seekers, refugees and military naturalizations.

† The author is a 26+ year practitioner of immigration law based in New York City. He was awarded the Sidney A. Levine prize for best legal writing at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law in 1977 and has written extensively on immigration over the past years for the ethnic newspapers, World Journal, Sing Tao, Pakistan Calling, Muhasha and OCS. He has testified as an expert on immigration in civil court proceedings and was recognized by the Taiwan government in 1985 for his work protecting human rights. His article, "The Bush Temporary Worker Proposal and Comparative Pending Legislation: an Analysis" was Interpreter Releases' cover display article at the American Immigration Lawyers Association annual conference in 2004, and his victory in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in a case of first impression nationwide, Firstland International v. INS, successfully challenged INS' policy of over 40 years of revoking approved immigrant visa petitions under a nebulous standard of proof. Its value as precedent, however, was short-lived as it was specifically targeted by the Administration in the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004.

‡ This article © 2009 Alan Lee, Esq.

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