Congress will soon break for the holidays and when they come back they will need to once again decide how the FAA and aviation improvements are to be funded. As surely as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west the Air Transport Association will be crying about how unfair the aviation excise tax is, a tax they don't actually pay, - their customers pay it. The alphabet organizations have been successful in letting congress know how important it is that they reject the user fee model but there is one aspect of user fees that I have not seen discussed. That aspect is the inability or unwillingness of government agencies to control costs under a user fee funding scheme.

The immigration system is a model of how user fees lead to higher costs and higher costs to higher user fees. On a philosophical level it is easy to see why, when funded by user fees there is no incentive to keep costs down, whatever the costs may be they can always be passed along to the users. A quick look at the actual numbers proves the point.The user fee model was implemented for immigration services in 1952. The user fees have since been increased a number of times. The fact that there are increases is not surprising, inflation alone would demand increases. What is surprising is the acceleration in the rate of increase. Between 1952 and 1998 an application for a certificate of citizenship increased in cost from $5.00 to $160.00 reflecting a compound annual growth rate of 7.8% over a 46 year period. Seems high to me, but not outrageously so.

Between 1998 and 2007 that same application fee increased from $160.00 to $460.00 a compound annual rate of 12.45%. This is one of the lower growth rates. For example, a petition to have your foreign wife classified as an immigrant increased from $110.00 in 1998 to $355.00 in 2007, a growth rate of 13.9%. A petition to classify an employee in the proper immigration category increased from $115.00 to $475.00 during the 1998 to 2007 time frame, a growth rate of 17.1%. Wait, it gets worse. After you have paid to have your relative or employee classified in the proper category they still need to apply for a green card. That cost has gone from $220.00 in 1998 to $930.00 in 2007 a compound growth rate of 17.4% per year.

One last example serves to show how it isn't just the agency that wants to spend your hard earned dollars. A petition to permit you to temporarily reassign an employee from a factory in Europe (or anywhere for that matter) to the U.S. for a few years, has increased 12.6%. In addition, you'll also be privileged to pay up to another $2000 in worker training fees and fraud prevention fees. You pay them to immigration but congress created them. Including these congressionally mandated additional costs the compound growth rate rises to a staggering 40.32%. Proof that once congress jumps on the user fee band wagon they don't have any problem making up new ones.