The Price of Belonging: How a Proposed US Fee Hike Could Put Citizenship Out of Reach for Kenyan Green Card Holders
A proposed rule would nearly double the cost of US citizenship and scrap the fee waivers many low-income Kenyan immigrants rely on.
For thousands of Kenyans who have spent years building lives in the United States, the final step toward becoming American has always carried a familiar price tag and a familiar comfort: if the money was tight, the government offered a way through. A proposed rule now moving through Washington would erase both the affordable price and the safety valve, and the people who feel it first will be the nurses, care aides and shift workers who make up much of Kenya's diaspora in America.
A Kitchen-Table Calculation
Picture a Kenyan certified nursing assistant in suburban Maryland, a green card holder for the better part of a decade, who has finally cleared her debts and circled a date to file for citizenship. She has rehearsed the civics questions, gathered her tax transcripts and budgeted the application fee down to the dollar. Under the rules in force today, that fee is $760 on paper, or $710 online, and if her household income is low enough she can apply for less, or nothing at all.
Now imagine she opens her laptop to discover the figure has nearly doubled, and the discounts she was counting on have vanished. That is the choice the federal government is proposing to put in front of permanent residents like her. The naturalization decision, long treated as a matter of when rather than whether, suddenly becomes a question of money.
What Washington Is Proposing
US Citizenship and Immigration Services has published a proposed rule that would sharply raise the cost of applying for citizenship. The filing fee for Form N-400, the Application for Naturalization, would climb from $760 to $1,330 for paper submissions, and from $710 to $1,280 for online filings, an increase of roughly 75 to 80 percent.
The proposal reaches beyond the main application. The fee for Form N-336, used to appeal a denied naturalization case, would rise from $830 to $1,475 on paper and from $780 to $1,425 online. Together the changes would reshape the arithmetic of citizenship for anyone who is not wealthy.
The agency frames the move as a shift to what it calls a full-cost, beneficiary-pays model. In its filing, USCIS argues that the fees it currently charges do not cover the true expense of processing a citizenship case, including background checks, interviews and additional vetting, and that applicants for citizenship should carry that full cost rather than have it subsidised by people applying for other immigration benefits. The agency also notes that recent policy changes have added new screening requirements, raising the resources each case demands.
The Waiver That Disappears
The headline number is the fee increase, but for low-income immigrants the quieter change may matter more. Today, applicants whose household income sits at or below 400 percent of the Federal Poverty Guidelines can apply for a reduced naturalization fee of $380, and others facing genuine hardship can request a full fee waiver. The proposed rule would eliminate both.
That is the part that lands hardest on working families. A waiver is the mechanism that lets a home health aide or a warehouse worker become a citizen without choosing between the application and the rent. Strip it away, USCIS itself acknowledges, and some eligible permanent residents will simply delay or abandon the process. The agency concedes in its own analysis that the result could be green card holders who keep renewing their permanent resident cards rather than naturalising at all. Only military service members applying under special provisions would keep their fee exemptions.
Why This Lands Hard on Kenyans
The United States is home to one of the largest and most established Kenyan communities abroad, and it remains the single biggest source of the remittances that flow back to Kenya, accounting for well over a third of the money households at home receive. Behind those statistics are people in exactly the income brackets the waiver was designed to protect: caregivers, hospital aides, drivers and hospitality staff who send money home every month and have little left over for a four-figure government fee.
For many of them, citizenship is not a status symbol but a practical shield. It unlocks the right to vote, the ability to sponsor relatives still in Kenya, protection from the shifting winds of immigration enforcement, and a passport that makes travel home simpler. A near-doubling of the cost, paired with the loss of waivers, does not change how much these families want those protections. It changes whether they can afford to claim them.
The Quiet Cost of Staying Put
There is a second-order effect that worries immigration advocates. A permanent resident who postpones naturalisation does not stop existing in the system; they remain a green card holder, subject to renewal fees, travel scrutiny and the broader uncertainty that has surrounded lawful permanent residents in recent policy debates. The same week this proposal surfaced, a separate Supreme Court ruling expanded the circumstances under which returning green card holders can be detained at the border, a reminder that permanent residency is more conditional than its name suggests.
In that light, pricing citizenship out of reach is not a neutral act. It risks leaving a slice of the Kenyan diaspora in a longer, more precarious holding pattern, eligible to become American on paper but unable to take the final step in practice. The destination has not moved; the toll to reach it has.
Sixty Days to Be Heard
For now, nothing has changed at the cashier's window. The proposal is exactly that, a proposal, and current fees, reduced fees and waivers all remain in effect while it is reviewed. USCIS has opened a public comment period of 60 days from the rule's publication in the Federal Register, after which the agency can revise the plan, withdraw it or push it through to a final rule.
That window is the one lever ordinary people hold. Community organisations, immigration attorneys and diaspora associations have used comment periods before to register the human cost of policy changes, and the same channel is open now. For a Kenyan nurse in Maryland weighing whether her citizenship dream still fits her budget, the months ahead will decide whether the door she has been walking toward stays open at today's price, or closes behind a fee she cannot pay.
