It's not the idea of increasing immigration fees that's objectionable, it's the degree.

And the degree by which the federal immigration agency wants to boost application and service fees that immigrants pay is enormous. Under a new fee schedule proposed by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the cost of filing more than two dozen kinds of immigration forms will rise by an average of 66 percent this year. The basic fee to apply for citizenship would rise from $330 to $595. By the end of the process, each applicant may have paid nearly $2,000.

Some increase is surely warranted. The last comprehensive and significant increase was nine years ago, and in 2005 the fees rose a few percentage points to cover inflation. And U.S. fees have been suppressed for years, with tax-funded subsidies keeping them below those even in other Western nations and far below those in poorer countries.

However, the sticker shock of these increases is due to the approach the Department of Homeland Security is taking, mandating that USCIS become largely a self-sufficient agency that covers costs with fees. Expecting the overwhelmingly poor population of would-be immigrants to shoulder all the expenses is unreasonable and may be counterproductive.

The feds, with one hand, are beckoning for people to follow the legal path toward citizenship while handing them a whopping bill with the other. At a few thousand a head, this may compel immigrants with even modest-sized households to run the other way.

Money collected will pour into the Immigration Examinations Fee Account. That fund is meant to cover the full cost of processing immigration and naturalization benefit applications and petitions, the high-tech "biometric" digital identification files, and a host of other services. The fees also will be subsidizing costs for asylum and refugee applicants and help for other immigrants.

Congress must examine this plan for agency functions that should be taxpayer supported, and demand that the agency improve on its operational efficiency before dunning immigrants quite so heavily. There must be a middle ground that won't drive immigrants away from the legal path everyone wants them to follow.