Rising Administrative Costs Within the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service
As part of the Make Our Voices Heard campaign granted by the New York Community Trust, Immigrant ARC curated guest blog posts, each written by one of our members. These insightful and informative pieces highlight their insights, learnings, and recommendations around the current issues in immigration and immigration legal services. The posts reflect only the views of the member organization authoring them, and don't necessarily reflect the views of I-ARC, or our coalition as a whole.
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by Tarana Sable, Immigration Law Unit, The Legal Aid Society
In January, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced its intent to dramatically increase the cost of many of its applications, including those for lawful permanent residency and employment authorization, in a proposed rule published on the Federal Register. The rule drew over 7,000 comments, the bulk of which criticize the proposed fee increases as unfairly burdensome to applicants.
The cost of operations for USCIS is indeed rising. However, the agency should mitigate this problem by reducing the length and complexity of immigration forms instead of relying solely on fee increases, which have historically failed to improve processing times, backlogs, or customer service. An analysis by The Cato Institute in December 2022 found that, from 2003 to 2022, “the total length of USCIS immigration forms grew from 193 pages to 701 pages –– an increase of 501 pages,” not including the length of form directions. According to David Bier, the author of the study, the vast majority of these increases have reflected agency discretion, rather than new legislation.
This rise in paperwork is burdensome on adjudicators and applicants alike, and it appears to correspond to substantial fee increases: for example, the I-130/I-130A Petition for Alien Spouse, which increased in length by 800 percent from 2016 to 2022, is also set to increase by up to 65 percent in cost if the proposed rule were to be adopted. Despite the enormous increase in paperwork, Bier notes that denial rates for these applications have remained steady, an outcome which suggests that, for all their added complexity, these longer and more expensive applications produce the same results as their previous counterparts.
This metastasizing paperwork represents an insidious strategy for impeding legal immigration without garnering significant pushback from the public: using an accretion of subtle administrative changes to construct an immigration system so labyrinthine (and expensive) that eligible petitioners are dissuaded from applying for immigration benefits altogether. Under the oversight of Trump-appointed ombudsman Julie Kirchner, who spent eight years as the director of an anti-immigrant hate group that has advocated against “high-volume immigration” to the United States, USCIS doubled or tripled the length of many of its applications, puffing up forms with “complex and vague questions” that many applicants would not know how to answer without the assistance of an immigration attorney.
Although President Joe Biden has reversed many (though not all) of Trump’s most headline-grabbing policies on immigration, many of these under-the-radar changes have been left in place. And now, if the fee changes proposed by USCIS go into effect, immigrants seeking a better life for themselves and their families in the United States will be forced to pay for them.
Tarana Sable is a paralegal casehandler in the New York Immigrant Family Unity Program (NYIFUP) within the Immigration Law Unit of The Legal Aid Society.
