ANALYSIS: End of Exemptions — How Trump Is Monetizing American Naturalization

Introduction: when citizenship becomes a commodity

The signal of June 22, 2026

On June 22, 2026, the United States Department of Homeland Security published in the Federal Register a proposed rule that, if it enters into force, will radically transform access to American citizenship. Form N-400 — the gateway to naturalization for green card holders — would see its cost jump from $760 to $1,330 for paper applications, a 75% hike, and from $710 to $1,280 for online applications, an 80% hike. Simultaneously, DHS proposes to eliminate all financial waivers and reduced rates accessible to low-income people.

This is not a technical adjustment. This is not simply an accounting update. It is a political declaration: the Trump administration considers that access to citizenship should no longer be facilitated by the state, but entirely borne by the applicant, regardless of income level. DHS calls this model "full-cost, beneficiary-pays" — a cold formula for a burning political choice.

The logic of the financial barrier

This decision fits into a broader and very coherent context. Since Donald Trump's return to the White House, the administration has systematically increased the costs of access at every stage of the legal migration journey: asylum application fees, work permits, temporary protected status, non-immigrant visas, down to biometric enrollment. Naturalization was one of the last thresholds still equipped with a financial safety net for the most destitute. That safety net has just been targeted.

DHS itself provided the underlying argument with disarming candor: "free or low-cost filings may encourage aliens who know or suspect that they are ineligible to apply anyway." In other words, the price is seen as a filter of deterrence, not just cost recovery. The message is coded but legible: not everyone who is legally eligible is wanted.

The anatomy of a hike: the numbers one cannot ignore

The amounts at stake

Concretely, here is what the proposal entails. For Form N-400, the paper filing fee rises from $760 to $1,330 (+75%). Online, from $710 to $1,280 (+80%). For Form N-336, which allows one to contest a naturalization denial, the hike is even steeper: from $830 to $1,475 on paper (+78%) and from $780 to $1,425 online (+83%). A citizenship candidate whose file is denied and who wants to exercise their right of appeal must therefore pay a total of nearly $2,800 in administrative fees alone.

For comparison, Canada currently charges $630 Canadian dollars (approximately $460 USD) for adult naturalization. Australia charges $560 Australian dollars, less than $370 USD. Germany, one of the great liberal democracies, charges only the equivalent of about 255 euros. Even with the proposed hike, the United States would not be the most expensive in the world — the United Kingdom charges nearly £1,709, approximately $2,200 USD for naturalization. But the symbolic gap is immense: other countries, such as Ireland for refugees or Luxembourg, charge nothing at all.

The disappearance of exemptions: the essential point of the announcement

What makes this proposal particularly severe is not the fee hike in itself — it is the total elimination of financial waivers. Currently, naturalization candidates can benefit from a full exemption based on their income, their status as a public benefits recipient, or their financial hardship situation. A reduced rate of $380 also existed for people whose income did not exceed 400% of the federal poverty threshold. Both pathways would disappear entirely under the proposal.

The only exemption that would be maintained is that for active-duty military members and veterans, protected by law. Everything else: eliminated. A legal permanent resident who has lived in the United States for five years, pays their taxes, raises their children here, but whose income does not allow them to pay $1,330 at once — will simply be de facto excluded from the naturalization process. Not denied, not deported. Just blocked by a financial wall.

Legal immigration in the crosshairs: a deep-rooted trend

The trap of the "illegal vs. legal" narrative

For years, the American right's discourse on immigration structured itself around an apparently reasonable distinction: we want to stop illegal immigration, not legal immigration. Donald Trump himself repeated this formula ad nauseam. But the data from the past eighteen months invalidates this rhetoric. According to an analysis by the Cato Institute published in April 2026, the Trump administration has reduced legal immigration at a rate 2.5 times greater than the reduction in illegal immigration. Of the total immigration reductions, 72% come from legal immigration, not irregular immigration.

The numbers are damning: legal entries by asylum seekers at the southern border fell by 99.9% between December 2024 and February 2025. Refugees entering legally dropped by nearly 90% between December 2024 and March 2026. Visas for spouses and fiancés of American citizens dropped by 65%. Student visas declined by 40%. H-1B visas for highly skilled workers likely fell by approximately 25%. This is not a crusade against fraud: it is a systematic compression of legal immigration in its entirety.

An architecture of obstacles

The naturalization fee hike adds to an architecture of obstacles methodically constructed since January 2025. The administration suspended humanitarian parole programs covering more than 1.5 million people — Ukrainians, Afghans, Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans. The State Department suspended the diversity visa lottery in December 2025. Immigrant visas were suspended for nationals of 92 countries from January 2026. A fee of $100,000 was imposed on new H-1B visa petitions for workers residing outside the United States — a measure that, according to a judicial document cited by the Cato Institute, reportedly caused an 87% drop in petitions for workers outside the territory.

Each measure, taken separately, can be justified by a technocratic argument: cost recovery, enhanced vetting, protection of the American labor market. But the whole paints a coherent picture: making the legal immigration path sufficiently costly, uncertain, and exhausting that legitimate candidates give up before they even begin.

The monetization of naturalization: a deliberate political logic

Transforming a right into a priced privilege

DHS's official argument for justifying the fee hike is as follows: previous administrations, including Biden's, intentionally kept naturalization fees below real cost to promote citizenship and integration. The Trump administration intends to end this implicit subsidy and make the applicant pay the full processing cost of their application. The "full-cost, beneficiary-pays" model is presented as budgetary rigor.

But this logic contains a radical philosophical reversal. In the liberal republican tradition, naturalization is not a commercial service whose price must cover production costs. It is an act of state that engages the entire political community. Generations of legal scholars and political scientists have defended the principle that the barrier to access to citizenship must be civic in nature — language proficiency, knowledge of institutions, length of residence — and not financial. Once price becomes the determining variable, citizenship ceases to be a right in the making and becomes a product reserved for those who can afford it.

The political signal: deterring even legal immigration

DHS itself inadvertently provided proof of the deliberately deterrent nature of the measure by asserting that low fees "may encourage aliens who suspect their ineligibility to apply anyway." This formulation implies that the hike is not just a cost recovery measure but a price-based filtering mechanism. Yet the vast majority of naturalization applicants are legal permanent residents who have met all requirements — they do not "suspect" their ineligibility, they know they are entitled. The hike hits them just as hard.

This signal is all the stronger because it comes at a time when the administration is simultaneously seeking to denaturalize already naturalized citizens. In June 2026, the Department of Justice announced denaturalization proceedings against 17 immigrants, after targeting 12 the previous month. DHS had asked its agents to refer more than 200 denaturalization cases per month. The entry into citizenship is made more costly. Already acquired citizenship is put under pressure. The message is coherent: naturalization is no longer perceived as a natural horizon of the legal migration journey, but as an exception to be doubly merited.

The "Big Beautiful Bill": the legislative matrix of monetization

A law that changed everything

The proposed naturalization fee hike does not come from nowhere. It follows directly from the "One Big Beautiful Bill," signed by Donald Trump on July 4, 2025. This budget law fundamentally reconfigured the financial architecture of American immigration by creating or massively increasing fees on dozens of categories of applications. It notably established fees on previously free procedures: $100 to apply for asylum, plus $100 per additional year of pending procedure — penalizing applicants for the system's own delays.

The law also multiplied existing fees spectacularly. Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which protects millions of people from countries devastated by disasters or conflicts, saw its fees jump from $50 to $500 — a 900% increase. The appeal before the Board of Immigration Appeals went from $110 to $900 (+718%). A waiver application for a ground of inadmissibility now costs $1,050. These fees are defined as legal minimums: agencies can go even higher without going back to Congress. And the law provides for annual inflation adjustments.

No waiver, no grace

One of the most striking features of the new immigration fiscal regime is the near-total elimination of financial exemptions. Where previous administrations maintained a safety net for hardship situations — insufficient income, social welfare recipients, asylum seekers fleeing persecution — the new architecture requires payment in almost all cases. An asylum seeker fleeing a brutal dictatorship, with nothing in their pockets, must pay $100 to file their application. No waiver. No grace. If they do not pay within 30 days, their case is rejected and their work authorization suspended.

The Catholic legal immigration aid organization, the Catholic Legal Immigration Network (CLINIC), detailed the concrete impact: a combined application for adjustment of status with a challenge to a ground of inadmissibility can now reach nearly $3,000 in fees alone. An appeal of a deportation order costs more than $1,010. These amounts are not theoretical: they are real obstacles for families whose median income is often well below the middle-class threshold.

The "Gold Card" and citizenship of varying geometry

When $5 million opens all doors

The contradiction is glaring. While the Trump administration makes ordinary naturalization more costly and eliminates aid for the poorest, it simultaneously promoted in March 2025 a radically different concept for the very wealthy: the "Gold Card," a pathway to American permanent residence for an investment of $5 million. President Trump himself, often associated with anti-immigration positions, became the enthusiastic promoter of a mechanism granting immigration rights in exchange for capital.

This is not inconsistent if one accepts the market framework: American citizenship is worth something, and access to it should be proportional to financial capacity to contribute. The poor green card holder who has waited five years, paid their taxes, raised their children, and integrated perfectly, but does not have $1,330? Please wait. The foreign investor with $5 million to invest? Welcome, here is your express lane. Variable-geometry citizenship is not an accidental drift in the Trump system: it is its founding logic.

The investor versus the worker

This tension between the "Gold Card" and the naturalization fee hike perfectly illustrates the administration's immigration philosophy: migrants are desirable insofar as they bring capital or rare, expensive skills. Billionaires and star engineers at $100,000 H-1B visa fees — yes, if necessary. Essential workers, families, former refugees now permanent residents who took the normal path? They must prove their utility through financial capacity.

Think tanks and immigrant rights organizations have used the term "wealth test" to describe this logic, referencing the "public charge" rule Trump had already tried to impose during his first term. Today, the terminology has changed, the instruments too, but the philosophy remains: only solvent migrants fully deserve to belong to America.

The deterrent effect: who gives up and why

The numbers of deterrence

The deterrent effect of a naturalization fee hike cannot be measured directly, but its contours can be glimpsed through related data. According to the Cato Institute, the Trump administration collected $1.3 billion in immigration fees from migrants who found themselves unable to actually enter or regularize their situation in the United States because of simultaneously enacted prohibition policies — more than 2 million applications affected. This figure illustrates a perverse reality: fees can be collected and the process blocked anyway.

For naturalization specifically, rights advocacy organizations estimate that the elimination of financial waivers would primarily affect green card holders with incomes below 400% of the federal poverty threshold — a population representing a significant fraction of annual American naturalizations. Concretely, a family of four with an annual income of less than $120,000 was eligible for the reduced rate. These families would face a lump sum of $1,330, with no possibility of assistance.

The psychology of giving up

Beyond the numbers, the deterrent effect also operates at a psychological level. A person who hesitates, who is not certain of having gathered all their documents, who fears making a mistake in their file — what DHS describes as someone who "suspects" their ineligibility — will be deterred not by a clear refusal but by financial risk. If I spend $1,330 and my file is rejected, I must then spend another $1,475 to contest. The total: $2,805 for a process that may fail. Faced with this risk, many will choose to remain permanent residents indefinitely — legally vulnerable, without the right to vote, without the full belonging that citizenship confers.

This is precisely the effect that critics denounce: not bureaucratic refusal, but voluntary renunciation induced by fear of cost. The most precarious people are often also the least well-informed about their rights, the most exposed to procedural errors, and therefore the most likely to abandon in the face of a financial risk of this magnitude.

International comparison: the American exception in the making

What other Western democracies do

The American fee hike, taken in isolation, is not without international precedent. The United Kingdom, often cited as the most extreme example, currently charges approximately £1,709 (approximately $2,200 USD) for the naturalization of an adult — much more than the rate proposed by the Trump administration. Switzerland exceeds 3,000 Swiss francs. Austria reaches 900 to 1,050 euros. Countries such as France, Spain, Portugal, Japan, and Luxembourg charge almost nothing, or nothing at all.

But the relevant comparison is not just the absolute amount — it is the existence or absence of waiver mechanisms for disadvantaged people. Ireland fully exempts refugees from naturalization fees. Germany allows reductions or exemptions based on financial situation. Australia maintains a reduced rate for refugees and humanitarian cases. What the Trump administration proposes — a high rate with no financial exemption except for military personnel — constitutes a more radical position than most major Western liberal democracies, including those that charge high nominal amounts.

The British model as a cautionary tale

The British case deserves special mention. The United Kingdom has progressively transformed its citizenship fees into a net revenue source for the Home Office: the actual administrative cost of processing an application is estimated at around £386, but the government charges £1,709 — generating substantial profit. This policy has been criticized by civil organizations as "citizenship for sale."

The United States seems to be embarking on a comparable path, but with one crucial difference: America has historically founded its national identity on the principle that any deserving legal resident could become a citizen, regardless of their fortune. That is the melting pot myth, the promise made to generations of immigrants who built this country. When the Trump administration explicitly abandons the policy of "promoting citizenship and integration" that guided its predecessors, it is not merely changing a fee. It is revising part of the founding contract.

Denaturalization: when acquired citizenship becomes fragile

The legal offensive against naturalized citizens

In parallel with the rise in the costs of access to naturalization, the Trump administration has launched an unprecedented offensive against already naturalized citizens. In June 2026, the Department of Justice announced denaturalization proceedings against 17 immigrants, after targeting 12 the previous month. DHS demanded that its agents refer more than 200 denaturalization cases per month. Denaturalization — the judicial procedure by which a citizen is stripped of their nationality — was historically extremely rare in the United States. Approximately 130 cases had been initiated between 2017 and July 2025 in total. The current pace is an order of magnitude higher.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin stated unambiguously: "citizenship is a privilege, it must be earned honestly" and that the administration would "continue to use all legal means to denaturalize and deport non-citizens." The formulation is interesting: calling already naturalized citizens "non-citizens" in an official statement says a great deal about the conception of citizenship animating this administration. Naturalized citizenship would therefore be, in this vision, a second-tier citizenship — revocable, conditional, fragile.

A double compression movement

The dual movement — making entry into citizenship more expensive and making already acquired citizenship more fragile — is not the product of chance. It expresses a coherent and deliberate vision: naturalization should no longer be a natural and encouraged step in the legal migration journey, but a difficult-to-reach exception susceptible of being challenged. At the entry, a high financial barrier. At the exit, the specter of denaturalization. And between the two, an increasingly costly and complex administrative process.

This architecture is all the more effective because it requires no modification of the legal criteria for naturalization. The law formally remains the same. But by playing on costs, delays, financial risks, and the implicit threat of denaturalization, the Trump administration radically transforms the incentives — without ever having to openly defend a policy that would say: "we do not want legal immigrants to become citizens." The form is bureaucratic. The substance is political.

The West facing the mirror: when democracies monetize belonging

The systemic risk for liberal democracies

The Trumpian logic of priced naturalization is not exclusively an American problem. It inscribes itself in a broader trend observable in several Western liberal democracies, where citizenship and migration rights are progressively subjected to growing economic criteria. The United Kingdom has made its migration fees a net revenue source. Belgium has raised the prospect of bringing its own to 5,000 euros. Several European states have tightened income and employment conditions for access to permanent residence.

This general movement raises a fundamental question for the future of Western democracies: if belonging to the political community is conditioned by wealth, what becomes of the principle of civic equality? Political rights — the right to vote, to elect and be elected — belong to citizens. If access to citizenship is filtered by money, then representative government de facto represents the people wealthy enough to cross the threshold. Democracy shrinks.

America's role in the world

The United States has long exercised a symbolic function in the global imagination: that of the country that welcomes, integrates, and transforms foreigners into citizens. That function is not only symbolic — it has been, for generations, a considerable source of soft power. Immigrants who become American citizens are ambassadors of the American idea in their countries of origin, in their family networks, in their professional communities around the world.

When America makes its naturalization harder, costlier, and more uncertain — when it begins to treat naturalized citizens as potentially revocable second-class citizens — it erodes that soft power in a way that appears in no budget calculation. The next generation of researchers, entrepreneurs, and engineers who will choose Canada, Germany, or Australia because the path to citizenship there is simpler and more respectful — that cost, nobody tallies in the fees of Form N-400.

Legal and civic resistance

A comment period: the 60 days that count

The DHS proposal published on June 22, 2026 is a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking — it is not yet in force. A 60-day public comment period is open from June 22. During this period, any person — individual, organization, attorney, elected official — can submit comments to the Federal Register. These comments are not symbolic: the administration is legally required to examine them before finalizing the rule, and a high volume of detailed comments can delay, modify, or even cause the withdrawal of a proposed regulation.

Immigrant rights organizations — including the Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC), the National Immigrant Justice Center, and the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) — immediately mobilized their networks to encourage comments. Several specialized law firms are also advising current green card holders eligible for naturalization to file their applications now, at the current fee, before any potential entry into force of the new rule. Filing a file before the final rule fixes the fee at the amount in force at the time of submission.

Potential judicial challenges

A final naturalization fee hike rule would be likely to be challenged in court on several grounds. Rights advocacy organizations have already successfully challenged previous USCIS fee hikes, notably by invoking violations of the Administrative Procedure Act if the administration's economic reasoning is found to be arbitrary or insufficiently substantiated. Other remedies could invoke equal protection and due process arguments if the disappearance of exemptions can be documented as disproportionately striking protected groups.

For now, the rule on $100,000 H-1B fees is also being challenged before federal courts, notably by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The American judicial ecosystem constitutes a real brake on the hasty implementation of these policies — which distinguishes the United States from other regimes that tighten their immigration policies without institutional counterweights. But the courts cannot do everything, and they cannot speed up the examination of thousands of files simultaneously.

Trump, a necessary evil? Assessing the coherence of a record

What Trump does well and what he undoes

To be intellectually honest, one must acknowledge what the Trump administration accomplishes elsewhere. Its firmness vis-à-vis China — the principal systemic adversary of the West — remains a strategic orientation coherent with the long-term interests of liberal democracies. The pressure on NATO to increase defense spending has produced concrete results. The trade retaliation policy, whatever its imperfections, brought to the table a reality that decades of naive free-trade had masked: certain economic dependencies on authoritarian regimes are strategic vulnerabilities.

But on institutions — on the safeguards of liberal democracy, on the rule of law, on immigration policy as national identity policy — Trump is a threat that his supporters minimize and his radical opponents sometimes handle clumsily. The monetization of naturalization is not an effective border control policy. It does not stop an irregular migrant. It does not detect a fraudster. It discourages deserving legal residents from becoming citizens — and thus weakens national cohesion rather than strengthening it.

A critique of an administration that targets the wrong enemy

Trump's immigration policy systematically targets the wrong level. Legal migrants are not America's enemy — they are, in large measure, one of its driving forces. Researchers leaving American universities in the face of threats to their visas will not easily return. Engineers choosing other destinations represent not just an economic loss: they represent a lasting signal sent to the entire global talent pool. And permanent residents who do not naturalize for lack of means remain second-class citizens in the only democracy that still seriously claims to be "the nation of nations."

Trump can claim to be a necessary evil for the West in the face of its external enemies — Putin's Russia, Xi's China, the mullahs' Iran, Kim's North Korea. On that front, his firmness, even when brutal, can be defended. But when he turns the instruments of the state against legal immigrants, when he monetizes naturalization to discourage integration, he strikes the West from within — more surely than any external adversary could.

The political horizon: toward an America that shrinks

What demographic projections say

The policy of discouraging naturalization does not play out only in DHS offices or courtrooms. It plays out in long-term demographic statistics. The United States is one of the few major democracies whose population continues to grow in absolute terms, and this growth rests very largely on immigration. According to Census Bureau projections, by 2050, more than one in five Americans will have been born abroad. The question of under what conditions these people — and their children — will become citizens is an existential question for American democracy.

If millions of legal permanent residents are durably deterred from naturalizing by financial barriers, the American electorate will increasingly fail to reflect the demographic reality of the country. Entire communities, often among the most economically and socially active, will remain outside political citizenship — without the right to vote, without direct representation, without the full protection that nationality confers. This democratic shrinkage is not spectacular. It is silent. It accumulates file by file, un-filed Form N-400 after un-filed Form N-400.

The irony of an America that mistrusts itself

There is a profound irony in the fact that an administration that proclaims its desire to make America great again should choose precisely to discourage people from becoming American. America's strength has always resided in its capacity to integrate, transform, and naturalize — to make the foreigner a compatriot. This mechanism is not only humanistic: it is strategic. It creates loyalty, investment, and civic engagement. An America that makes naturalization inaccessible to the poor while selling it for $5 million to the rich is an America that has ceased to believe in itself.

The end of exemptions is not the end of naturalization. The process still exists. But it will be, if the rule is finalized, a process reserved for those who can afford it. And in a country whose founding myth rests precisely on the idea that being born in poverty is not a condemnation — that anyone who works hard, contributes, and respects the rules can aspire to full belonging — that is a betrayal whose scope the DHS's budget columns will never capture.

Conclusion: a barrier that says more than a fee

The deep meaning of a regulatory proposal

The DHS proposal of June 22, 2026 is still, legally, a proposal. It can be modified, delayed, blocked. The comment period is open. The courts are available. Civic organizations are mobilized. Nothing is decided. But the political signal, for its part, has already been sent — clearly, deliberately, and with disarming candor: the Trump administration does not consider access to citizenship a right to be facilitated for deserving legal residents. It considers it a service whose full cost must be borne by the applicant, regardless of income level.

This philosophical reversal — from the promotion of citizenship to the monetization of citizenship — is the true subject of this analysis. Not the $1,330 figure. Not even the elimination of exemptions. But the fact that a major Western liberal democracy explicitly declares that it no longer wants to encourage its legal residents to become its citizens. That is where the real change lies, and that is where one must continue to look in the weeks and months to come.

What to watch now

Several variables deserve close monitoring in the coming months. First, the volume and quality of comments submitted during the 60-day period — well-documented legal and factual comments have historically had more impact than simple petitions. Then, any potential judicial challenges seeking to block the final rule before it takes effect. Next, Congress's reaction — particularly from Republican members representing districts with large legal immigrant populations, who may be sensitive to pressure from their constituents. Finally, the impact on naturalization numbers themselves: if the rule takes effect, USCIS data over the following 12 to 24 months will show whether the chilling effect is as strong as advocacy organizations fear.

The history of American immigration is also the history of the obstacles this country placed on the path of those who wanted to be part of it, and of the struggles that progressively dismantled those obstacles. The end of exemptions is one chapter of that history. It is not the last. But it deserves to be clearly named for what it is: a deterrence policy that, under the guise of budgetary rigor, fundamentally recodes the relationship between America and those who aspire to become its full members.

Signed Maxime Marquette, columnist

Sources

Primary sources

DHS proposes 75% increase to US citizenship application fee — Ellis Immigration, June 22, 2026

Trump DHS Proposal Would Hike Naturalization Fees for Immigrants — Bloomberg Law, June 22, 2026

Trump Administration Seeks to Revoke U.S. Citizenship of 17 Immigrants — The New York Times, June 8, 2026

Secondary sources

Trump Has Cut Legal Immigration More Than Illegal Immigration — Cato Institute, David J. Bier, April 13, 2026

How the Trump administration is undermining legal immigrants — The Guardian, March 21, 2026

The Anti-Immigrant Policies in Trump's Final Big Beautiful Bill, Explained — National Immigration Law Center, July 4, 2025

Trump Visa Bans Left Migrants Paying $1.3 Billion in Fees Despite Near-Zero Chance of Entry — Business Times / Cato Institute, March 20, 2026

How the Trump administration is eroding the immigrant talent pipeline — Brookings Institution, June 8, 2026