Biden’s DHS Raises Prices on Immigrants?

Photo by Kerwin Elias on Unsplash

(Conservative Free Press) – The Biden administration on Tuesday proposed a completely new structure for visas and naturalizations. The proposed rule, announced by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) , would focus on increasing the costs for business-related applications and reducing those costs for humanitarian visas. If the new structure is applied the agency’s revenues would increase from $4.5 billion per year to around $6.4 billion per year.

USCIS Director Ur Jaddou in a statement said that this move would also seek to improve customer service operations, while also handling the application load. The move would also be in alignment with USCIS’s humanitarian mission. Jaddou added that the new plan would help the agency “to more fully recover operating costs for the first time in six years” while also helping support the Administration’s effort to reform the legal immigration system.

The agency’s revenues predominantly come from the application fees it charges. However, in the past two years, the Biden administration and Congress have provided the necessary funds where needed for the USCIS to handle their backlog.

Shev Dalal-Dheini, director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association noted that “USCIS had asked for a significant amount of backlog reduction funding [for 2023].” However, Congress did not agree due to them having a carryover. This has proved to be a problem for the agency before as they also had carryover before 2020 but had managed to spend it all before the pandemic.

During the pandemic, the USCIS lost staff and had to go on a hiring freeze. The Trump administration’s policies also meant that the agency needed to move from immigrant services to probe into alleged fraud in visa and naturalization applications.

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