The Price of Citizenship Just Went Up — By $570

A new federal proposal would raise naturalization fees by 75% and strip fee waivers from hundreds of thousands of low-income immigrants. The government isn't hiding its reasoning.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration wants to charge legal immigrants $570 more to become Americans — and for the first time in the modern era, it’s saying out loud that it doesn’t think encouraging citizenship is the government’s job anymore.

The Department of Homeland Security published a proposed rule Monday that would raise the filing fee for Form N-400 — the application for U.S. naturalization — from $760 to $1,330 for paper filers, and from $710 to $1,280 for those filing online. The fee to appeal a denied citizenship application would jump from $830 to $1,475. The rule was published in the Federal Register on June 22 and opens a 60-day public comment period through August 24.

Those numbers alone would reshape the economics of naturalization for hundreds of thousands of people. But the fine print is where the real damage is.