INSIDE GRENADA FRIDAY December 14,2007 From The Embassy of the United States of America to the Eastern Caribbean. Effective January 1, 2008, the application fee for a U.S. nonimmigrant visa will increase from US$100 to US$131. This increase allows the Department of State to recover the costs of security and other enhancements to the non-immigrant visa application process. This increase applies both to non-immigrant visas issued on machine-readable foils in passports and to border crossing cards issued to certain applicants in Mexico. The Department is required by law to recover the cost of processing non-immigrant visas through the collection of the Machine-Readable Visa application fee. Because of new security-related costs, new information technology systems, and inflation, the $100 Machine-Readable Visa fee is lower than the actual cost of processing non-immigrant visas. In fact, the $100 fee was already lower than the cost of processing non-immigrant visas when the fee was reviewed as a part of the cost of service study in 2004. The Department has been absorbing the additional cost. We are now collecting 10 fingerprints from each applicant, and the cost charged by the FBI to review those fingerprints no longer allow us to do this. The application fee has increased twice since 9/11; the last time was 2002.