More immigration fee gouging

U.S. immigration officials announced Tuesday that citizenship application fees will double and permanent residency application fees will triple:

WASHINGTON -- Immigration officials said Tuesday they will proceed with plans to double the cost of applying to become a U.S. citizen and triple the fee for seeking legal permanent residency.

The fee increases will take effect July 30. Citizenship fees will rise from $330 to $595, plus $80 for required electronic fingerprints, an increase of $10. For legal permanent residency and fingerprints the cost will be $1,010 for those over 14. The cost now is $325. [AP]

Update: "Gouging" isn't a complaint about the existence of fees, per se.  It's a complaint about a massive fee increase levied on a captive audience with no say in the fee structure. Doubling and tripling fees overnight is gouging, especially if you're charging for an absolutely necessary service.

This particular fee hike is especially irksome because the hike is nominally intended to improve service in the future. The people who have to pay double on August 1st endured the shitty service and now have to pay twice as much for it.

Comments

[Alon Levy]

It's official: the government's stealing more money from me than the mugger.

[Whispers]

Hey - tax increases!

Sad that the Republican want to increase taxes and thus produce a drag on the economy.

[Matt]

As someone who had paid these fees in the past and will pay more again in the future (my wife is a LPR) I'm personally unhappy to see them go up. As someone who has done a lot of work with various organazations providing pro bono and low-cost legal services to immigrants I'm also sorry to see them go up since I know it will be hard for people. But why 'gouging'? Doesn't that imply making an unreasonable profit? If I suspected that the increased fees would go into reducing huge back-logs and providing better service at an agency that has been, almost always, under-staffed and under-funded I'd not even mind. The linked article claims that the increased fees will go for this sort of thing. I'm sad to say I'm a bit skeptical that the money will be well used but there is certainly a need for more money in the system and it is not obviously unreasonable to fund the system via user fees rather than taxes, at least above a certain level. I might favor a sliding scale fee schedule though it would be extremely hard to implement in many cases and would add quite a lot to the paperwork and beaurocracy involved. Given this I think this post is a bit off.

[mudkitty]

Next they're going to outsource and privatize Immigration Services.

[Alon Levy]

Matt, government funds are fungible. The government doesn't need each department to be self-financing; the IRS exists to make sure the other departments can focus on delivering services. The military doesn't loot to cover the defense budget. Why should the immigration division of the DHS charge exorbitant fees to process its backlog?

[Idealistic Pragmatist]

It's worth noting, I think, that the fees to immigrate to Canada are not only much lower, but that as one of their election promises the Conservative (!) Party of Canada pledged to lower them so as to make things easier on immigrants. Just saying.

[Alon Levy]

Yeah, I was just telling Katie that moving to Canada at the end of grad school was looking better and better. By then global warming will even make Toronto's winters mild and pleasant.

[soullite]

This bill puts veto-power over every job in America in the hands of the federal government. Every application will have to be processed for "eligibility" by a federal database, regardless of citizenship status of the applicant. Personally, I'd rather not live in a country where George W. Bush has a the power to prevent me from working at Burger King simply because I disagree with him politically.

People who see the benefits of this law look increasingly clueless to me. Amnesty that will never really happen for most immigrants, and amounts to a way for some to buy their way in the US. A Guest worker program designed to exploit the poor in other nations and depress wages in this one. Granting the ability to the federal government (or corporate governance) to create employment black-lists to punish unruly workers and unionizers. All of this isn't worth the few good measures in this bill, and I will never understand why anyone thinks they are. The Democratic party is only going to gain more power on this issue, it is best to wait until we can get a bill that doesn't have all of this crap tacked on.

[Alon Levy]

Oddly, I agree.

[Matt]

Government funds are fungible, of course, but that doesn't meant that it might not make sense to fund an agency from user fees or that doing so is unjust. (It might be unwise, but that's not what's implied by 'gouging'.) As it is, USCIS is, via statute, largely funded via fees. You can say this is stupid if you want but that's quite a different argument from the one implied in the section here.

[Whispers]

Matt:
funds collected by immigration don't get channeled back to immigration. That's not how the budget works.

If you want to say immigration should be funded more, that's a good argument. It has nothing to do with what's going on here, which is simply an increase in fees on people who don't vote in American elections.

I live in the UK and the Home Office here does the same thing. Fees for processing visas are exorbitant, far beyond anything related to the cost of processing the paperwork. Why? Well, why not? From the standpoint of the locals, they already have too many immigrants anyway, and increasing the fees won't make a serious dent in the number of immigrants, but it can relieve the overall pressure on the budget. So - tax the non-voting immigrants!

[cfrost]

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming . . .

Oh, screw it. Look, just fork over the dough.

[Disgusted Beyond Belief]

It isn't just an increase in fees on people who don't vote. My wife was not a citizen (well, she is now) - we had to pay those fees. Which means I had to pay those fees. I vote. Now she votes too. And she remembers.

It was a slow, pain-in-the-ass process that I may write about on my blog sometime, come to thin of it. And we were doing it through the 'easiest' and 'quickest' route. Funny how the three years on paper really took seven years in reality.

[Dave]

The whole system is screwed and I can not wait for it to blow up in their faces!

[B-Money]

"Why should the immigration division of the DHS charge exorbitant fees to process its backlog?"

Why not? This follows a basic economic principle: supply and demand. The demand to be a citizen or permanent resident is very high, and the available opportunities are very small in comparison to the demand. Hence, the cost must go up. I see no problem with it. Also, this issue will never affect me or my family, so why should our tax dollars be used to subsidize the process? Taxes could be used on some other useful social program to assist the immigration process. Maybe education or job-training assistance, or child care subsidies.

[Alon Levy]

The available opportunities are being artificially restricted. It's not as if there are only X possible jobs in the US and no more, so any naturalizations beyond quotas will only increase unemployment. No; the government could double or triple the quotas tomorrow with no or imperceptible ill effects.

Also, there are a lot of issues that don't ever affect me or my family, and yet I pay for them: farm subsidies, S&L bailouts, Medicaid, the occupation of Iraq, small business tax breaks, the Interstate system, Pell grants, public works of any kind. Some of these I'd like to get rid of, but it has nothing to do with whether I benefit from them or not. Hell, I contend that Congress and the White House don't benefit anyone who isn't a politician or a DC resident, but I don't think they should be made to live out of their own pockets.

[B-Money]

"Also, there are a lot of issues that don't ever affect me or my family, and yet I pay for them: farm subsidies, S&L bailouts, Medicaid, the occupation of Iraq, small business tax breaks, the Interstate system, Pell grants, public works of any kind. Some of these I'd like to get rid of, but it has nothing to do with whether I benefit from them or not..."

I agree Alon, just being a bit cheeky, that was all. You couldn't be more right on this point.

Artificially restricted or not, it is in the governments perogative to admit as many or as few immigrants as it chooses into this country. The job issue is irrelevant in this discussion, as this is centered around people seeking residency or citizenship. This is not about worker visas or temp workers, etc. Unless I read something wrong in the linked article.

However, you are right, there are jobs and will be jobs.

[citycrimes]

Who's the captive audience? Is somebody forcing them to apply? How much would they go for if you auctioned off the right? The captive audience is the rest of us who are forced to pay for the education of illegal immigrant children. That's compulsion.

[Alon Levy]

I just saw on Lou Dobbs that the bill is also increasing the H-1B cap from 65,000 to 180,000. Is that true?

[mudkitty]

I challenge any of you to produce your grandparents papers.

[Matt]

Whispers,
How do you know what you say? Supposedly USCIS's immigration services are run out of their fees. That's what the article also says, and that the increased fees are to pay for more expensive services (due in part to increased work loads.) Maybe you're right. But I'd like to see some evidence since it seems to go against a lot of official statements. Also, it's worth noting that fee increases are usually announced long in advance. Sometimes, of course, you can't help when you can apply for things. But, fee increases are rarely surprises to people working with immigrants (I worked for several agencies while in law school) and are usually announced on the USCIS web page. I haven't been watching this so don't know if that's true here.

Note that _any_ fee increase would have much the effect that Lindsey opposes- it would be put on people who may have no choice but to pay (in some sense), it will benefit those who make use of the services after they pay more than them, etc. This is true of, say, toll rodes as well when you don't use them often. So, this can't make something unjust. Again, it might be a bad policy decision for a number of reasons and I'm generally skeptical that a big organization can be properly run on a fee funding basis and would be happy to see a scheduled fee system if one could be worked out that wouldn't be gamed or just promote more beaurocracy. But those are all different charges than 'gouging', a charge that's usually bankrupt and seems to me to be here.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Applying for US citizenship, or lawful residency isn't like ordering a pizza. You don't wake up one morning and send cash or money order for your American decoder ring.

The people who are going to have to pay triple on July 1 probably started the process years ago. The ostensible reason for the hike is to pay for improved service. Yet, the people who have finally made it to the front of the line are going to get none of those benefits, yet they'll be asked to pay twice or three times what they expected.

If they're going to hike fees, they should do so gradually with fair warning, not precipitously. If they need an immediate infusion of cash, the federal government should chip in to offset the cost.

We all benefit from border security and efficient customs and immigration services. Don't you want to have immigration officials check people out when they apply to be citizens? I do. The benefit isn't just for the immigrant whose application gets processed, it's for residents to know that newcomers are being vetted in a fair and expeditious way.

[ChrisR]

If they need an immediate infusion of cash, the federal government should chip in to offset the cost.

For example, Congress can introduce and debate a request for emergency supplemental funding. The annual increase in revenue from the increased fees is $1.1 billion, only about 4.2 Iraq-days.

[zuzu]

It's worth noting, I think, that the fees to immigrate to Canada are not only much lower, but that as one of their election promises the Conservative (!) Party of Canada pledged to lower them so as to make things easier on immigrants. Just saying.

They already have lowered them. I even got a refund since I paid under the older, higher, rate.

Also, Canada's immigration process is simplified and fairly smooth. You could really do everything without a lawyer. The US system is a bureaucratic nightmare. I remember working briefly in an immigration law firm before I found a permanent job, and the forms were voluminous, nitpicky and required you to fill out everything absolutely perfectly (no typos or coloring outside the lines) or the claims would be rejected.

My great-grandparents did nothing more to immigrate here than book passage on a boat and spend some time at Ellis Island.

[B-Money]

But it's Canada. There is no rush to the borders. But given their easy access to cheap prescription meds, maybe there should be!

There is no question that the immigration process to this country is a bureaucratic joke. The process seems Vogan-esque from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy! (Thought the reference was appropriate given Lindsay's choice for the site name!)