10/03/2007

The House Judiciary Committee Immigration Subcommittee hold a hearing on the immigration fee increase on September 20, 2007. The Subcommittee called three witnesses from the USCIS and three private sector witnesses. USCIS witnesses included Deputy Director, Associate Director Michael Aytes, Finance Director, and one of the private sector witnesses included William Yates, former Associate Director. Among the USCIS witnesses, only the Deputy Director verbally testified but all three private sector witnesses made verbal testimonies. 

These witnesses have however submitted their full written testimonies for the hearing record and we hope that the Subcommittee make these written testimonies available to the public as soon as possible. Oral testimonies were reduced to the four because of the time constraint in the hearing. Private sector witnesses focused their testimonies on three points: 

(1) Substantial portion of the premium processing generated fund was used for security clearance and support of other functions, which should have been paid by the general revenue from the tax rather than fee revenue; 

(2) Improvement of improvement of USCIS management, homeland security should help not only the immigrants but also the general government system and the public, and in this regard, part of the funding should have been allocated from the general fund of tax money by the Congress; and 

(3) Backlog has been caused by the inefficient and ineffective management of immigration benefits petitions and applications by the USCIS and it is unfair that the immigrants should take over the burden from the agency's inefficiency. 

The USCIS witness justified the fee increase in that GAO report of 2004 recommended and sort of mandated it for backlog reduction and homeland security improvement. Additionally, in order to achieve the GAO recommendation, the agency needs improvement in infrastructures, account system initiation, other changes, which all require increased funding, and the USCIS revenue is currently generated from the fee income. 

Congressman Gutierrez grilled the government witness for the suspicious delay of implementation of green card rule changes to match close to the implementation of the fee increase rule implementation and the USCIS is required to submit the answer to this question in writing later.