US to raise cost of becoming citizen by 66%

The Bush administration is proposing to more than double the cost of becoming a US citizen and drastically raise the cost of becoming a legal permanent resident.

Citizenship and Immigration Services, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, announced today it wants to raise the application fee for citizenship from $324 (€249) to $903 (€695) and the fee for becoming a legal permanent resident from $179 (€138) to $1,368 (€1,053).

“As a fee-based agency we must be able to recover the cost necessary to administer an efficient and secure immigration system that ultimately improves service delivery, prevents future backlogs, closes security gaps and furthers our modernisation efforts,” said Emilio Gonzalez, CIS director.

The agency said the new fees would reduce average application processing times by the end of September 2009.

Fees for a wide variety of immigration services would rise an average of 66%.