WASHINGTON:
For the first time since 2016, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is raising a few immigration and naturalization costs. The modification will take effect on April 1.
Applications for family-based immigration, employment-based petitions, and U.S. citizenship cases are all impacted by the increases. USCIS is mandated by U.S. immigration law to update its fee schedule every two years.
According to a USCIS statement, “[The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, or DHS] is now increasing the premium processing fees USCIS charges for all eligible forms and categories to reflect the amount of inflation from June 2021 through June 2023 after leaving these fees unchanged for the three years following passage of the [USCIS Stabilization] Act.”
The majority of the DHS agency USCIS’s operations—nearly 96% of them—are funded by user fees.
The H-1B visa category, which permits 85,000 highly skilled foreign nationals to enter the country and work for at least three years, is the subject of the major reforms. Starting in March 2025, the registration fee will rise from $10 to $215 per registration for the fiscal 2026 season and beyond. These costs are covered by the employers.
The objective, according to the immigration department, is to match payments to the expenses incurred in running the H-1B registration system. However, the $10 registration fee is still applicable for the current fiscal 2025 cap season.
The current $640 application fee for U.S. naturalization will rise to $710 if submitted online. The application fee is $760 if the applicant decides to mail it in.
Using the I-130 form, U.S. citizens and holders of green cards can request to sponsor specific family members. The current filing fees for this petition are $675 for paper filing and $625 for internet filing.
Instead of paying $535 for that K-1 visa, citizens of the United States who wish to bring their fiancée to the country will have to pay $675.
Applicants will pay between $1,225 and $1,440 for completing form I-485, which is used to adjust status to permanent residency, often known as a green card. Applications for advance parole and employment authorization, which were previously free under the adjustment of status procedure, will now run you an extra $260 and $630, respectively.
Additionally, in order to process petitions for both temporary and permanent workers on behalf of specific companies, USCIS is implementing a new $600 asylum program cost. The payments are covered by the employers.
The charge will go toward funding asylum-related initiatives, such as those pertaining to the asylum processing rule implemented by the Biden administration. As a result of this rule, USCIS personnel will conduct asylum merits interviews for individual recent arrivals instead of immigration judges.
Concerned about the effect on small-business owners, the American Immigration Council and the American Immigration Lawyers Association submitted comments during the rule-making process in March 2023.
The American Immigration Council states that “in the final rule, USCIS chose to impose lower filing and asylum program fees to small employers (limit of 25 full-time employees) and cheaper filing and no asylum program fee to organizations.”
USCIS received 10.9 million filings in the fiscal year 2023. Additionally, the agency reported that they resolved over 10 million open cases, resulting in a 15% decrease in total backlogs. Additionally, the Oath of Allegiance was administered by USCIS to about 878,500 newly appointed citizens.
USCIS Director Ur M. Jaddou said in a statement, “We’ve finished a record number of cases, responded to growing crises around the globe with important humanitarian support, and deployed new technologies to improve customer experience and minimize backlogs.”