U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is set to raise the fees to apply for work visas and residency starting April 1, in some cases hundreds of dollars more, to better fund and speed along the infamously slow immigration process.
The agency is backlogged and has become increasingly burdened. USCIS responds to the uptick in demand for foreign work permits and extends resources to the thousands of people being processed each month for humanitarian parole at the southern border.
Under the new rule, employers are footing some of the bill for the agency’s costs in processing asylum seekers. A new $600 program fee is tacked onto two of the main filing types, petitions for permanent residency and temporary work permits.
If an employer is sponsoring a foreign national worker, they’re being hit twice, said Matthew Gross, partner and co-head of the Dallas office of BAL, a global corporate immigration law firm. Companies are paying increased filing fees and the new asylum program fee.
“That’s shifting the cost burden to U.S. employers who are completely independent of that political issue on the border for simply filing petitions to legally sponsor work for international workers in areas that they need the talent,” Gross said.
USCIS receives 96% of its funding from filing fees. The agency still requires congressional funding to address the increased volume of caseloads, USCIS stated. The immigration agency said it needs to hire more staff as it wasn’t built to handle the number of cases it receives and is still recovering from pandemic-related attrition and labor shortages.
The cost of filing a petition for a nonimmigrant worker for an H1-B visa, or a work permit for a high-skilled foreign worker, is planned to jump 70% to $780, according to the federal agency. The corresponding registration processing fee will grow next year from $10 to $215.
The rate hike came as the integrity of the H1-B registration process was largely called into question. Reports of employers gaming the lottery system to better their prospective workers’ chances by filing duplicate applications led to a change in the petition process.
Sam Adair, executive partner at Graham Adair, Inc., an employment immigration law firm that primarily handles H-1B petitions, said the increase in the registration process fee is being done in part to prevent employers from submitting the same candidate under multiple subsidiary companies.
While the rules prohibited employers from doing that, it didn’t stop them, he said in January.
“It’s a $10 fee to submit these applications so it’s pretty cheap to try to bump up the odds,” Adair said. “This is really a pretty smart measure to help curtail those types of applications.”
For named beneficiaries of H-2A and H-2B visas, or temporary work permits, rates are increasing by more than 130%, inching close to $1,100. Application fees to transfer foreign executives or managers through an L nonimmigrant permit are rising from $460 to $1,385.
The fees for the form used to apply for permanent residence will increase by 26%, costing $1,440.
There’s also a $50 discount for filing online.
Most businesses in a 30-firm survey conducted by BAL said that the increased fees won’t impact their ability to compete globally. The 13% of firms who expressed issue with the additional fees cited higher costs of bringing talent to the U.S. as their main cause of concern.
“Some companies can sustain those costs and continue with their same talent strategy that includes sponsoring foreign national workers,” Gross said. “Other companies will ultimately have a chilling impact on them as far as their willingness to sponsor what really is needed talent.”
While 60% of businesses reported that they plan to file the same number of petitions and offer the same benefits, that same group said they’re interested in exploring alternative visa options or immigration strategies to mitigate the impact of fee increases.
USCIS published a final rule on January 30 to adjust fees for the first time since 2016. The agency said the change will allow USCIS to recover a greater share of its operating costs and improve its processing times, stated USCIS Director Ur Jaddou.
“Despite years of inadequate funding, the USCIS workforce has made great strides in customer service, backlog reduction, implementing new processes and programs, and upholding fairness, integrity, and respect for all we serve,” the director stated.
The new rule removes roughly $727 million of estimated annual costs.
