Washington, D.C. (July 29, 2020) – The U.S. House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship examines today the oversight and funding of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the DHS agency which administers the nation's lawful immigration system. A furlough of 13,400 USCIS employees was recently postponed while the fee-funded agency struggles with a funding shortage. The agency soon will be implementing a fee increase, but this will be insufficient to address the chronic fiscal problems caused by an obsolete funding process and excessive use of fee waivers and fee exemptions.
 
In her testimony before the subcommittee, Jessica Vaughan, the Center's director of policy studies, commends the present administration, writing, "Our legal immigration system is now administered in a way that aligns more closely with our national interests, better protects U.S. workers, and makes it harder for special interests and bad actors to game the system." This has, she continues, "allowed processing times to be improved for the majority of applications, processing backlogs to be significantly reduced, and the agency to approve the highest number of new citizens in 11 years."
 
Vaughan testifies that USCIS has a crushing workload, is flooded by fraudulent applications, and operates under an obsolete funding process that includes too many benefits programs – like DACA, U visas, and asylum applications – that are unfunded and thus a fiscal drag on the agency. 
She recommends the following: 

• Increases in USCIS workload from fee-exempt or reduced-fee applications must be avoided.
• Fee waivers should be sharply reduced. 
• Congress should work with USCIS to create a new, streamlined and accelerated process for the agency to assess and adjust fees as needed.
• Congress should seriously consider creating an appropriations process for the fees that USCIS collects. 

"USCIS is preparing to implement a new set of fees in the very near future that will greatly help the agency's financial situation," writes Vaughan. "While advocates (predictably) have criticized the fee proposal as another alleged attack on immigrants, in fact the new fee structure will reduce some of the subsidies that most legal immigrants have to pay to support the processing of applications who do not have to pay, or who pay an artificially low fee."
 
Vaughan continues, "But it will not be enough. USCIS operates under an outdated and inadequate funding process that will prevent the agency from ever keeping up with its workload while maintaining secure, appropriate standards of adjudication." She cites several problems: 

• The fee-setting reviews take too long to complete. USCIS is only now about to implement the latest adjustments to the fees, based on a review process that was initiated in 2018. The processing costs on which the new fees were based will be out of date nearly as soon as they go into effect.
• Too many of the application fees are set artificially low, meaning that legal immigrants and their sponsors have to subsidize these applications. According to USCIS data, in recent years the growth in receipts from non-fee bearing applications has exceeded the growth in receipts from the fee-bearing applications.
• Issuance of fee waivers increased dramatically in the last several years. USCIS recently revealed that the fee waivers in 2018 were valued at $368 million and were granted to approximately 350,000 applicants. To avoid escalating costs for legal immigrant applicants, the fee waivers should be granted more rarely.
• USCIS should charge higher fees on applications that should be dis-incentivized as a matter of policy. Congress has provided the agency with the authority to deviate from setting fees that represent the exact cost of the benefit in order to serve policy goals. For example, the government wants to encourage immigrants to become citizens, so the fees for naturalization have been set artificially low to encourage eligible aliens to become citizens, or at least to avoid having a high fee be a deterrent to naturalization. 

Vaughan's testimony highlights DACA as an example of a challenge USCIS was forced to accept. Because the fees charged to DACA applicants was artificially low (covering only the cost of the work permit and fingerprinting), the 2.4 million applications the agency has had to process have been a "shock to the system". The result of the flood of unfunded applications which were given high priority for processing was the use of so-called "lean & lite" background checks which allowed more than 2,000 criminals and gang members to obtain DACA benefits. What's more, DACA contributed to two-thirds of the increase in the processing backlog that began in 2012 and caused huge increase in wait times for legal immigration categories, including for U.S. citizens sponsoring their spouses.