Taxing Immigrants

By Jonathan Rowe, Washington Monthly. Posted October 19, 2004.

Let's say you are an excitable partisan of the right, the kind for whom a small tax increase foretells a Stalinist ascent. You have just learned of a government levy that has gone up by over 50 percent in the past four years. This levy hits people at the very start of their entrepreneurial journey. It comes along with a bureaucracy so labyrinthine and inept that those subject to it pay thousands of additional dollars in lawyer fees and other expenses just trying to meet its demands.

Taxes, lawyers, bureaucrats – it is acetylene to your ideological passions. Your outrage is in a white heat. Instinctively your mind sets to work on a polemical weapon with which to hack this beast to bits. The phrases start coming. The federal government is determined to crush the dreams of the honest and hard-working people. The liberals and their bureaucrat buddies want to drown aspiration and kill hope.

While brave Americans fight to extend freedom abroad, the liberal taxers want to quash it here at home. They want to impose a Freedom Tax. Quick, get Grover Norquist.

Except for one thing. The tax-and-spenders weren't behind the draconian increases at issue here. They happened on the watch of George W. Bush himself. And the target of this big hike was a demographic group for which the president has expressed his deepest regard – recent immigrants. These are mainly yellow- and dark-skinned people who have come here legally and are trying to live up to their responsibilities in their new land. They are people for whom America truly is the beacon of freedom the president proclaims it to be. Yet in the past four years, the Bush team has rewarded their faith with boosts in immigration fees that amount to a big tax increase.

At the Republican National Convention, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger spoke with eloquence of the dream that draws newcomers to this land. "They come because their hearts say to them, as mine did, 'If only I can get to America.'" President Bush has echoed those sentiments; often he declares that America is a "welcoming" nation.

When the president says such things, people might bear in mind exactly how his administration has chosen to welcome them – by raising taxes on exactly the things Washington supposedly wants immigrants to do: work to support their families, play by the rules, and become citizens.

Jose, Take a Hike

The nation's immigration bureaucracy churns far below the radar of the national media, but if you are a recent immigrant you know the story only too well. Over the last four years, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (more commonly USCIS; it was called the INS before it was ingested by the new Department of Homeland Security) has been raising prices like a greedy plywood salesman before a hurricane. It has hiked 31 existing fees and had added nine categories of new ones. The most common have gone up by over 50 percent. Because the process of entering the United States legally involves many separate bureaucratic steps; moreover, the fees pile up the way tolls on the Connecticut Turnpike used to do, with booths every few miles. We're talking real money, for people who generally do not have much.

Say you want to come to the United States to join family members already here. First, your relative must file a petition on your behalf. That cost $110 when Bush took office; now the fee is $185. Once you've been approved, you'll need a greencard to enter and remain in the country. In 2001, the fee was $220; now it's $315. In addition, you must pay the immigration service to take your fingerprints; that fee has nearly tripled in the past four years from $25 to $70.

That's Bush family policy for immigrants, and it's just the beginning. If you're already living in the United States on a student or work visa when you apply for your greencard, you'll have to pay even more fees – all of which have gone up. While you're waiting for your greencard – often more than a year – you might have to go home on a family matter. A "parole visa" to get back into the United States will cost you $165, up from $95. If you finish school or change jobs before your greencard arrives, you'll need to file a separate application to work here legally (2001 fee $100; 2004 fee $175). Four years ago, these fees would have totaled $550; now the sum is $910. Your tax to live and work legally in the United States went up 65 percent.

Jonathan Rowe is a Washington Monthly contributing editor.

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