Migrants applying for green cards in the United States with hopes of adjusting their status are facing drastically high government fees. There has been a clear surge in application fees for visas and green cards, according to the USCIS (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services). For instance, marriage-based green card applications including the mandatory I-130 petition of behalf of a family member has doubled from $1,760 to $3640. Also, fees for accompanying children were supposed to be lessened, but they will not be decreasing moving further as their costs will be similar to adults’. Under this new fee proposal, families migrating to the United States will be met with significantly raised application fees, making it difficult to file for green cards. Not only has the cost for employment based-visas such as H1B heightened, but family-based immigrant applications are undergoing the same changes in cost.
The reason for this apparent increase in government fees for migrants correlates with UCSIS’ responsibility to review every immigration fee structure every two years. USCIS gains a large portion of their profitability from their filing fees, and it has not implemented new fees since 2016. Moreover, the staffing issues and abundance of applications requires a higher investment to be allocated to these causes. Therefore, UCSIS made the decision to increase their fees, a strategy that it claims will improve customer service and simplify managing the application backlog.
