Putting the US Embassy on Blast

What Does an Extra $2,000 in Fees Matter?

I got a new notification from Boundless Immigration a few days ago. Like most things related in any way shape or form with my husband’s visa to come to the USA, I developed an instant sinking feeling on opening it. The feeling of dread and aversion has expanded since I started on this visa journey in January of 2020 three years ago. It’s a learned helplessness type of reaction that has occurred from being kicked, swatted at, ignored, delayed and mostly just automated into the digital gulag of please press one for English/there are no representatives available/goodbye nightmare of being just a meaningless number in their system. It only affects whether my family can live together or not. It’s no big deal really.

This email wasn’t directly related to my husband’s case, but it sure affects us anyways. USCIS, that is United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, wants to over double the total fees for a marriage based green card to $3640. When I made my first husband Oh’s green card in 2014 I thought the $740 application price was steep. This does not include the application fees for the I-130, the I-864, the police check, medical check, travel expenses or any other things. As was posted:

“USCIS released a long-awaited proposal this week that will raise application fees for almost every category of immigrant to the United States. While early press coverage has focused on the significant price increases for employment-based visas like the H1B, Boundless has discovered that family-based immigrant applications will also face dramatic fee increases. This includes a doubling of total fees from $1760 to over $3640 for many marriage-based green card applications when including the mandatory I-130 petition for a family member. In addition, fees for accompanying children will no longer be reduced and their costs will mirror adult applications. For an immigrant family of four, the costs to bring a spouse and two children to the United States could exceed $10,000 under this new fee proposal.

Why is this happening?

The proposed fee hikes are expected since the agency is required to review its immigration fee structure every two years. USCIS receives roughly 96% of its funding from filing fees and hasn’t introduced new fees since 2016. The cash-strapped agency is facing staffing challenges and an ever-increasing application backlog. USCIS Director Ur M. Jaddou stated that the new fee structure would allow the agency to “improve customer service operations and manage the incoming workload.”

So we have billions of unaccounted for dollars going towards arming Ukraine, supporting other foreign nations and warming sandwiches for those crossing America’s Southern border. Despite that if you are so unfortunate as to be trying to get your spouse or children to the United States legally, you’d sure better be able to fund it from your own pocket. I’d guess the $10,000 estimate on a family of four is on the low end. It cost me about $5000 including travel expenses on Oh’s green card, and that was way back in 2014. My husband Ka has been relatively cheap so far at only about $1500 or so. Of course we haven’t even entered the realm of the real expenses yet.

When will these changes take effect?

USCIS is required to follow a specific process mandated by the Administrative Procedures Act to enact major changes to their services and fee schedule. The first step is the publishing of a proposed final rule, which was released on Jan. 4, 2023. Following the publication of the proposal the agency must conduct a 60-day comment period to collect public feedback on the proposal. Once the comment period ends, the agency can take a variety of actions, including modifying or withdrawing the proposal. After any modifications occur based on feedback, the final rule will be published. This can take place as quickly as 30 days after the end of the public comment period. The final published rule will state the date that the new rule will be implemented, which can be 30 days or more from the publication date.

Based on this timeline, Boundless expects that, if the final rule mirrors the recommended fee increases included in the proposal, these new fees could take effect as soon as May 2023.

It doesn’t really matter when the changes take effect. Based on my learned helplessness about this situation the fee increases will go through and another $1880 will be added to the cost of getting my husband legally to the United States. After the three year long process I’ve been through thus far I assume that I might be waiting for the next fee change four more years from now. And the one after that, assuming we’re all still alive. The price of employment authorization and advance parole are also proposed to rise to $650 and $630 total. That’s a total bargain by comparison! Does anyone want to sponsor my husband on a JB-1 instead? I heard there is virtually no wait and they are aggressively hiring, especially in healthcare.

Calendar days counts weekends and holidays. So if you apply on a Saturday presumably your visa interview could be as soon as Monday. The US Embassy wouldn’t want to inconvenience foreign visitors or students (especially those doctoral ones getting Covid bucks and NGO funds to author papers on how to decrease vaccine hesitancy and how safe and effective the jabs are) or temporary workers after all. Warm bodies are needed for those jobs in the USA!

Perhaps you are starting to see how great of an investment all those lobbying dollars are. Of course even if I were to save up the funds or find an employer sponsor to move Ka to a nonimmigrant visa class, which is very hard to do because he is married to me and thus presumed to be immigrating to the United States automatically, he would then need the Covid jabs. I heard North Korea recently dropped their vaccine requirements, so there’s that. Supposedly immigrants are exempt from jab mandates, and I wasn’t sure what to do with our dogs or land anyways. So my husband is in Thailand while I am back in Las Vegas waiting for the cows to come home or Hell to freeze over so I can travel with him freely as a family. I am planning on returning to Thailand soon, but for a wide variety of personal reasons, I want to bring my husband back to Las Vegas with me next time.

Now if you, like me, are so stupid as to be stuck into an immigrant visa category, perhaps because you married a foreign national who has children overseas, say, you might be curious what the wait time is on that class of visa. The US Embassy won’t tell you that directly, of course, and instead defers to a useless automated hotline that I do not think is actually staffed by any humans anymore. There is an equally useless circle jerk of an FAQ. If you already have an immigrant visa number, however, prompted by the acceptance of a valid I-130 (immigrant visa petition), you can log into your account. There I see the following information:

“The National Visa Center (NVC) has received your approved immigrant visa petition from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Before NVC can schedule your visa interview, you need to complete the following steps:

• Step 1:Pay fees.

• Step 2:Complete an Immigrant Visa (IV) Application (form DS-260).

• Step 3:Submit required financial and civil documents.

After all required documents are submitted, if something is missing or incorrect, NVC will send you an email to check your CEAC Messages. You can access your CEAC Messages by clicking "View Messages". To verify the email addresses on your case and provide updates as required, click ‘Edit’ in the Contact Information section.

After your documentation has been accepted by NVC, your interview will be scheduled at the local U.S. Embassy or Consulate.”

So all you have to do is pay some fees, submit all of the required financial and civil documents, and then the National Visa Center will either accept the documents or ask for more information. And then they schedule an interview, at their earliest convenience, which based on current backlog, will be in 1 to 24 months.

So a quick timeline of our process has been like this: I began inquiring to lawyers about making my husband a visa in January of 2020. Many did not get back to me and a few that did asked a lot of upfront money to even take my case. One lawyer suggested that Ka absolutely needed to be on an immigrant, not a tourist visa and suggested that I ask for emergency processing since I was in Thailand with my husband at the time.

I asked the US Embassy about this and they were very friendly and quick in response in January of 2020. They needed proof of my husband’s epilepsy which was the basis of my request. I thought this would be super easy to prove. It was not. I sent them some of his prescriptions but they could have been used to treat other things besides seizures. The original brain scans from the motorbike accident 15 years prior could not be tracked down.

Then the world shut down. The US Embassy denied the emergency petition and told me to file in the USA. My I-130 for Ka was filed on March 3, 2020. Everything went Covid stupid and no visa processing happened.

I didn’t hear back on my husband’s visa until around September of 2020. My I-130 was accepted. But they could not let me move on with other documents due to some backlog for several months after that. There were delays that were self inflicted of close to one year. My husband did not then, and does not now, want to immigrate permanently to the United States. He just wants to be with me and I want to be with him. He would like to see what the US is about but he has zero interest in divesting of everything in Thailand and staying forever in America. I do not want to give up the land in Thailand either.

In a sane world it would be easy for him to move freely and discover where he would like to stay and for us to determine where we would want to live our lives at any given time. But such a free market system does not allow for exploitation of the lower classes. So this type of border crossing is reserved for rich people and NGOs.

Here’s a look at my husband’s document page on USCIS:

You might notice that all of the documents for my husband were uploaded in early 2021. They could not be accepted or processed at that time, because the US Embassy closed down again for the summer of 2021 for more Covid stupid.

The documents were finally reviewed and accepted. But before my case could move forward, the US Embassy officials needed some stuff from me. In September of 2021 they told me I needed updated tax transcripts and, oddly, proof that my prior marriage had been terminated.

I found the marriage termination a strange request only because I had already had to submit Oh’s death certificate with my I-130 and it was embedded in the paperwork for mine and Ka’s marriage certificate. I need the document often to prove sole parental authority on our daughter. It seemed redundant to be asking for Oh’s death certificate again.

I really like collecting official documents in Thai language.

The updated income taxes were a nightmare. Nothing I mailed to them got officially worked out and filed until October or so of 2022. Nobody seemed to work at either the IRS or the US Embassy anymore when I tried to call. I sent them a frantic notice to the Embassy regarding my tax problems in June of 2022. It was ignored.

Here is what my processed paperwork looks like for my husband’s visa:

Now they finally accepted my updated tax return transcript. Now that my income has dropped, however, they are suggesting a joint sponsor in order to avoid any “Delays in processing.” Their use of the word “delays in processing” is pretty rich here. The fact that my income dropped below their guidelines due to their delays due to the Covid catastrophe just adds insult to injury.

It’s really confusing in a way though since the shutdowns caused my situation to change. They shouldn’t have needed new taxes when the ones I had were valid at the time I filed, for example, but weren’t after they finally opened up again three months later. Do they want to re review the domicile documents since I lived in Thailand for over two years? They could double check and make sure my husband hasn’t recently picked up a criminal record, even though I’d presume in this digital age they might know that even before I would.

Beyond that the Las Vegas house is being used as an asset to offset lack of income. I fully recognize that the most financially expedient thing for me to do is divorce my husband, forget about Thailand, become a single mother and pick up as many US.gov bucks as I possibly can. That lifestyle just doesn’t interest me. The system rewards all of the wrong things every step of the way. Families are broken apart and destabilized in every way that they can be.

The US Embassy could literally request more documents and delay for several more years. There’s nothing really stopping them. They want you poor, illegal, isolated and exploited.

I’m giving the entire process 1 star. To really understand the problems with illegal immigration, perhaps it’s fair to see the journey of legal ones. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Buy me a ko-fi