Insights

Holiday Gifts: Our Fees Stays the Same While USCIS Fees Increase

USCIS is increasing their filing fees across the board effective December 23, 2016. We have parsed through the fee summary charts and organized the fees into those that affect the services offered by our firm. We wanted to pass this on to our potential clients to help you plan ahead and also include a little Holiday Surprise during this time of the year.

Your Holiday Gift

We know that it may be overwhelming to cope with the increased fees from USCIS. That’s why we want you to know that while USCIS fees may be increasing, our firm’s fees will not be increasing this year. So, call us to get your case work into our firm! We can’t promise the same for 2018.

Here is a summary of what is happening to USCIS fees for the services that we offer. We have categorized them into your purposes for filing the petitions, to provide you a more organized chart for your needs.

Family Petitions

For the most part, USCIS has not increased the filing fees related to family petitions by more than $200. Thankfully, they understand that it is hard enough for families to come up with the payment of these fees already.

Employment-Based Petitions

For the most part, filing fees for Employment-based petitions, similar to the Family Petitions, also have only increased a little over $100, staying manageable for employers, both large and small.

Adjusting/Changing/Extending Status 

There is also no cause for panic if you want to simply change or extend your status. This affects those that are here on temporary visitor or student visas such as B1/B2, F1, M1, or J1. Same with Adjustment of Status to that of a Permanent Resident after the USCIS has approved your family petition (I-130) or employment petition (I-140) and your priority date is current on the visa bulletin.

Waivers – Higher Increases

What we are concerned about for our clients is these new fees for the waivers of inadmissibility. For those of you who are not familiar with waivers, most of these require showing a exceptional to extreme level of hardship that could be suffered by a qualifying relative if the petition is not granted. By increase these fees by almost $350, it seems that USCIS is bent on adding even more “hardship” to the applicants and their relatives who are already suffering from extreme or exceptional hardship. Sympathetic to the plight of our clients, if we have to submit a waiver for your petition in 2017, we will give you a 10% discount, around $100 in savings.

International Entrepreneurs 

For your convenience, we have also included the following chart for those thinking about utilizing the EB-5 Investors Program to become a permanent resident of the country. The filing fee for the immigrant petition has more than doubled. But otherwise, the fees affecting individual investors have stayed the same, the majority of the increase comes from regional center certifications.