USCIS Proposes Fee Increases

USCIS announced a proposed fee increase today, designed to address a $200 million budget shortfall for the agency in the coming fiscal year.  The proposed increase of approximately 10 percent would affect most petitions, and would leave applications for naturalization unaffected.  A 45-day public comment period will follow.

As an attorney in the trenches, I regularly see the incredibly poor level of service that USCIS delivers to its “customers”.  For instance, a company petitioning for an H-1B employee must already pay anywhere from $1570 to $2320 in filing fees, and it receives very little value for it.   

Increasingly, what we see in the adjudication are burdensome and unnecessary requests for evidence; evidence that is irrelevant and/or already provided in the initial petition.  For instance, recently, I received a request asking that I “prove” why a position for a staff scientist at a DNA sequencing start-up company qualifies as a professional occupation worthy of an H-1B.  In that case, the scientist in question has a degree in molecular cell biology from a U.S. university and is spending 100% of their time on scientific research.

It’s bad enough that in this era of declining applications, USCIS feels that it must make busy work for its under-employed contractors by encouraging those contractors to waste the petitioners’ time and money with unnecessary requests for more evidence.  Now they expect petitioners to have to pay ten percent more for this “service”?  Where I come from, they call that serious chutzpah.

Tags: fee increase, filing fee, H-1B, immigration, USCIS
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