The USCIS funding "crisis" is of its and the Trump administration's own manufacture

On July 22, the Miami Herald reported that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) had updated its website to “streamline” it and make it “easier” for immigrants to “navigate” when applying for benefits, like green cards. On July 29, Judge George Daniels of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York blocked the Trump administration’s “public charge” rule, ruling that it was inhuman and outrageous that the administration would prevent legal immigrants from seeking medical care during the COVID-19 pandemic if it threatened their legal status. Then on July 31, the Herald reported that the USCIS had instituted massive increases in fees for immigration services—including for the first requiring application fees for asylum seekers—for the reason of “poverty.” The biggest increase is for those applying for U.S. citizenship, with the application fee nearly doubling, from $640 to $1170 (but “only” $1160 if it is filed online).

Why is the USCIS claiming “poverty” when during the past four months it has, in collusion with the Trump administration’s immigration prevention policies, reduced dramatically the number of immigration-related cases it is processing? The fewer cases processed, the less money is coming in, while the more cases that are processed, the more money that comes in, right? This all sounds like the Trump administration is “gaming” the system; by slowing down the applications for green cards and naturalization, it is a self-creating the illusion of funding poverty, and using it to create a built-in “wealth test.” And let us not forget that the USCIS, at the behest of the Trump administration, began spending considerable amounts of its fees on “vetting” and “fraud detection.”

Most of this “fraud” is being perpetrated by the H-1B visa program, which the USCIS had for years ignored, focusing on Hispanic migrants, and had no system in place to track the continuing eligibility of visa holders, many of whom had employers who simply kept them on after their eligibility ran out, and then applied for new H-1B visa workers, which was an abuse of the system. But that failure was that of the USCIS, and immigrants who are legally in this country applying for green cards and naturalization should not be paying for the mistakes the USCIS made.

This is all ironic on many fronts. The USCIS made its application processes “easier”—but to do what? To make it “easier” for immigrants to “understand” that they have to pay much higher fees than before. The temporary injunction against the Trump administration’s first “wealth test”—the public charge rule—was quickly replaced with another “wealth test,” a substantial increase in fees, especially for those applying for green cards and U.S. citizenship. As pointed out previously, the number of immigrants allowed in this country is on pace to be nearly halved in FY 2021 compared to 2016 (with a much higher percent of them on work visas), and any claim by the USCIS that it is facing a desperate shortfall in funding is due solely to Trump administration immigration policies, which has been denying applications or delaying the process deliberately to assist in it program to lower (nonwhite) immigration to this country.

If anyone should be paying more, it is immigration services employees who are either doing less work, not working at all—or worse, spending most of their time on projects like vetting and “fraud” which do not bring in fees. But then again, the Trump administration and its political appointees in immigration services would love nothing better than to further reduce the ability of the USCIS to do its job by cutting its workforce because of a “crisis” of its own manufacture, a deliberate and nefarious effort at choking off and starving the USCIS for its ends.