washington The Department of Homeland Security said on Tuesday that the Biden administration is proposing to increase the fees that companies would have to pay for employment-based visas in order to fund the agency that oversees legal immigration.
Under the proposal, the initial fee for an H-1B visa would increase from $470 to $1,595. The visa, which allows immigrants with a college degree to live and work in the US for up to six years before becoming permanent residents, is a favorite among universities and other nonprofit research centers, as well as technology and financial companies.
The fee for an L-1 visa, which allows companies to relocate executives from overseas to offices in the US, would increase from $460 to $1,985.
The cost of applying for an EB-5 visa, which allows foreign investors to become US permanent residents if they invest at least $900,000 in a US-based project, will increase from $3,675 to $11,160.
The agency, US Citizenship and Immigration Services, released its fee-increasing proposals for a 60-day comment period. It is expected to take several more months to incorporate the feedback from the comments before the new fee structure is complete.
The fees are necessary to fund the agency that processes applications for citizenship, green cards and visas, as well as evaluating applicants for asylum or refugee status. Congress provides about 4% of the agency’s funding, and the rest—which includes services such as selecting refugees from overseas—must come from application fees that the agency collects.
The agency said the steep increase in fees for employment-based immigration benefits allows the agency to keep fees for citizenship and other humanitarian programs roughly the same. For example, the cost of applying for citizenship would increase from $725 to $760.
The agency is required by law to update its fee structure every two years, but has not done so since 2016.
The Trump administration attempted to implement a new set of fees in 2019 that would, among other things, raise money by nearly doubling the cost of applying for citizenship and attaching a $50 first fee to filing an asylum application. . Those changes were blocked by a federal court.
In 2020, the agency had a funding crisis as a decline in immigration applications under President Trump coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, which temporarily closed immigration offices. In the summer of that year, the agency was furloughing 70% of its staff indefinitely before Congress stepped in and created new fees to help keep the agency afloat.
Still, it was in a hiring freeze until March 2021, even as demands for visas and other immigration applications increased.
Since then, the agency has contended with unprecedented backlogs as it attempts to process increased demand with reduced staff.