The Biden administration on Tuesday proposed increasing application fees for employment-based visas and other immigration programs, in part to fund the adjudication of soaring numbers of asylum claims along the U.S.-Mexico border.
— would also keep application fees for U.S. citizenship and humanitarian immigration benefits, such as asylum, close to or at current levels, as well as codify and expand fee waivers for low-income immigrants and other populations, such as military veterans and victims of human trafficking and other serious crimes.
Under the proposed rule, applications from employers seeking to sponsor immigrants for permanent U.S. residency or temporary work visas would need to be filed with an additional $600 fee to fund the USCIS asylum program, which is responsible for screening migrants who ask for humanitarian refuge along the southern border, as well as other populations seeking U.S. asylum, such asMigrants wait at the US and Mexico border wall in El Paso, Texas, US, on Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022.
One of the most drastic fee increases would affect a program for wealthy immigrant investors hoping to move to the U.S. permanently. Applications for this program would soar to $11,160, a 204% spike. In a statement Tuesday, USCIS said the fee increases for certain petitions were necessary to cover operational costs, speed up application reviews, hire additional adjudicators, sustain the asylum program and reduce the agency's backlog of millions of pending cases. While USCIS historically updates fees every two years, the current fee structure dates back to 2016, the end of the Obama administration.
Citing the proposed rule's fee waivers and low fee increases for certain immigration programs, USCIS said the changes would"decrease or minimally increase fees for more than one million low-income filers each year."
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