Most people have personal goals that they want to achieve throughout their lives. For some, those goals may include starting a family or landing a dream job, and for others, those goals may relate to finding a safe and permanent place for them and their families to live.
Individuals commonly leave their homelands in search of better lives, and you may have come to Texas with that same dream in mind. However, you may not have taken the final steps necessary to become a naturalized citizen. Though you may have had this goal in mind for as long as you can remember, certain issues may have held you back.
Financial concerns
On top of the naturalization process typically taking years to complete, the application and other portions of the process have associated fees. Unfortunately, those fees are not small, and for individuals who may struggle financially already, the idea of taking their much-need funds to pay for a citizenship application may seem frivolous. In fact, the $725 application fee could go a long way in the lives of low-income individuals.
What you and many other people may not know, however, is that the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services can reduce or even fully waive the fees for qualifying people. If you live below 150 percent of the federal poverty line, USCIS will give you a waiver for the application fee. Still, numerous people who apply for citizenship and who could obtain this assistance do not submit a request for the waiver.
Why?
General speculation regarding a lack of waiver requests is that most people who could qualify simply do not know that it is an option. The information about the waiver is not widely known, and in some cases, language barriers can also make it difficult to understand. As a result, individuals are either submitting applications after somehow scraping together the funds or simply not applying for citizenship at all. Because information regarding all parts of the naturalization process is important, you may want to obtain professional help with your case.
An immigration attorney can help you understand the citizenship application, fees, fee waivers and reduction, and numerous other aspects of the process that you may not have fully understood before. This information could allow you to see that reaching your goal of obtaining citizenship may be closer to your grasp than you once believed.