Filipino couple Arnold and Roselle of Queens Village, N.Y., are among the thousands of immigrants who are presently scrambling to file for citizenship, green cards, work permits, and sponsorship of overseas relatives before application fees jump dramatically under a sweeping fee hike on July 30th.
“We’re almost complete with all the requirements except for the medical part,” said Arnold and Roselle, who requested their last names not be published. “We hope to finish everything by the third week of June. We are confident we can beat the deadline.”
The couple are in the process of adjusting their status for permanent residency. Both in their mid-30s, they came to the United States in early 2000. Arnold, an accountant from Taytay, Rizal, said he was originally petitioned by his current employer that entitled his wife, who is from Cavite City, to stay in the United States legally as his dependent. They have no kids.
The current application fee for a green card is $395. After July 30, it will be $1,010, which includes fees that were previously charged separately such as the fingerprinting.
“We really have to beat the deadline,” said Arnold. “Or I’ll end up paying $1,200 more for the two of us.” He added that he has other friends who are also rushing to beat the deadline.
Various agencies that assist immigrants, say their workload has dramatically increased, and they expect even busier days as the July 30 deadline nears.
“Everyone’s calling to ask about the fees and coming in to file applications,” Rosa Mantilla, president of Mantilla Services, a Paterson N.J.-based agency that caters to immigrants, told The Record. “We’re getting about 68 – 70 people a week coming to us to help them with the applications. Normally, we get about 25.”
Mantilla said she expects about 200 people to show up on June 24 when she devotes the entire day to helping immigrants.
In New Jersey alone, applications for naturalization, one of the most sought-after services, zoomed from 3,347 in April 2006, to 5,353 in April 2007, according to The Record. Nationally those figures were 65,227 compared to 110,004 in the same period. That fee will jump 69 per cent from $400 to $675.
Unlike other federal agencies, the U.S. citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) relies entirely on user fees, which many immigration advocacy groups and political leaders criticize.
The July fee increase of more than 60 percent will be among the steepest the agency has implemented.
Gustavo Ramirez, the director of the Immigration and American Citizenship Organization in Passaic told The Record: “I have files and files here that belong to people who started their application process for citizenship or to sponsor a relative to come live here, or to get a green card, and they haven’t continued with the process, because they are on low, limited incomes, and the fees are out of reach for them.”
Virginia Ng, a past president of the New Jersey chapter of the Organization of Chinese-Americans, said that many members of her ethnic community will have to choose between “paying these high fees and doing without – cutting back on other necessary things.”
“The immigrant population is one of our poorest,” said Ng, of River Vale. “They work very hard, at more than one job, just to afford food and rent.”
The agency last raised its fees in 2004, claiming that more intense background checks were required after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
USCIS officials say they need the higher fees to process applications more quickly. For example, it now takes about eight months in New Jersey to process an application for a green card. They say that they want to cut the average processing time for applications by 20 percent within two years. The fees also will help improve security features of documents and modernize the agency’s computer system, officials say.
