Rising fees may be a hardship for immigrants

[babylonsister]

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003579974_immigfees20.html

Rising fees may be a hardship for immigrants

By JULIANA BARBASSA

JOHN STOREY / AP

Sveta Nikitina, a Russian immigrant and mother of a 7-year-old, already scrimps to pay the fees for the work and travel permits that she must have.

SAN FRANCISCO — Supporting herself and a 7-year-old son on a preschool teacher's salary in suburban Marin County, one of the nation's priciest housing markets, keeps Russian immigrant Sveta Nikitina on a tight budget.

One expense she can't control is the rising cost of filing the forms she needs to work and travel in the United States while she waits to become a permanent resident. Those fees have already pushed her careful bookkeeping into the red.

And now her plans — and those of many other immigrants — could be pushed out of reach by a proposal to increase the filing fees for more than two dozen forms by an average of 66 percent. The increases are likely to be implemented by summer.

"It was a huge amount of money for me," she said. "I went into overdraft to do it, but what else can I do — throw in the towel, just give up?"

The $350 Nikitina paid this year to the Department of Homeland Security's Citizenship and Immigration Services would go up to $645 annually. That is just for filing the forms to renew her work and travel permits.

For the majority of legal immigrants who are just starting the residency application process that Nikitina already has under way, the fees for filing forms and for being fingerprinted would go from $935 to $1,985. Some people are allowed to file for free, including members of the military and refugees.

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[treestar]

1. Also a hardship on the U.S. citizens involved

their petitioner, for instance, the spouse.

These fees always go higher and higher and the INS in turn has gone slower and slower. The work permit that has to be renewed every year and the travel permit and an annual fingerprinting is because they take so long to process an underlying case.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

2. Just the form I-485 alone will almost triple in cost

From $325 up to $905. And it's not like these filing fees have been at the same amount for a long time. They just seem to be skyrocketing up year after year.

What do we get in return? Probably the most inept department of the federal government. Believe me, I've been dealing with them for about 15 years now. The USCIS adjudicating officers are just about the stupidest, most unprepared, ignorant and abusive and rude federal employees you will ever meet. I have met some good very ones and I'm just bowled over when I meet intelligent, capable ones. I even write commendation letters to their superiors for their permanent file (hoping they will be promoted into positions of influence) when I find good ones, as most are just not worth a darn. I don't know where they find these people or how they train them, but they just don't know the law and they are constantly making elementary mistakes of fact and law. For example, I'm representing a couple and their four children who were told all their I-485 applications to adjust status were being denied because the wife's underlying I-140 was denied. That was just not true. The underlying I-140 was approved and I submitted to the adjudicating officer the government's own approval notice. What happened? Only some of the derivative beneficiary I-485s were approved but not all - for absolutely no reason under the law. The case has now been in limbo for almost a year because of purely ignorant and lazy-lousy idiots at the USCIS who don't know the law and are just too lazy to inform themselves or even admit their own ridiculous mistakes. This is just one example among many, many similar ones I could relate.