Immigrants Struggle With Rising Fees
Supporting herself and a 7-year-old son on a preschool teacher's salary in suburban Marin County, one of the nation's priciest housing markets, keeps Russian immigrant Sveta Nikitina on a tight budget.
One expense she can't control is the rising cost of filing the forms she needs to work and travel in the United States while she waits to become a permanent resident.
Those fees have already pushed her careful bookkeeping into the red.
And now her plans -- and those of many other immigrants -- could be pushed out of reach by a proposal to increase the filing fees for more than two dozen forms by an average of 66 percent. The increases are likely to be implemented by summer. AP in The New York Times.