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ACTION: Trump Admin Plans to Hike Fees for Immigration Records
Making America dumber every day. Ignorance and hate are not virtues except for today's Republicans.
The little-known Genealogy Program administered by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services allows genealogists, family historians and other researchers to obtain citizenship and alien registration files, visa applications and other records documenting the lives of deceased immigrants who arrived in the United States between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries.
At a time when researching family history is booming, the nation’s immigration and citizenship agency has proposed dramatically hiking fees to access records from the first half of the 20th century.
Supplying essential records shouldn’t be a profit center, and it sure seems that a fee proposal by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) for records essential to our research as family historians is trying to do just that: raise revenue, not serve records.
The fees would nearly triple, and in many cases, they would rise nearly 500 percent to $385 to obtain a single paper file, not including the records request fee of a proposed $240.
The fee increase “has to be very important to anyone who does hobbyist genealogy. It would make it impossible for most average people to access” the file
As Asha Rangappa stated last week, "Understanding our roots is one of the things that helps unite us as Americans and gives us a common thread. Whether your descendants are Native American, came here involuntarily, or voluntarily because it promised a better life, these narratives are vital to our social fabric.
The files sometimes include hundreds of pages, documenting long waits at Ellis Island or, in the case of Japanese, Italians and Germans who lived in the United States during World War II, FBI reports about the immigrant’s friends, family and political activities.
The move has outraged professional and amateur genealogists, who argue that the increase would effectively put valuable immigration information out of reach for many.
ACTION: If this pisses you off—and it should-please leave a public comment. Go to the federal rule making portal linked at http://Recordsnotrevenue.com