According to a recent blog published by the Harvard Business Review, each year 90% of 8 million legal residents eligible to become US citizens choose not to do so. Why? What is holding back this significant contingent of U.S. residents from claiming the benefits of citizenship, including the right to vote, apply for a U.S. passport, work for the U.S. government, and apply for certain kinds of federal support? Could it be that the exorbitant cost of the citizenship application is preventing immigrants from taking the plunge?

In 1990 the US citizenship application fee was $90. Today the US citizenship application fee is $695. That’s six hundred and ninety-five dollars! And no, it’s not your imagination, that seems an unusually high figure to charge a group of people who have already been granted the right to remain in the U.S. permanently for the ability to take the final step and join the citizenry of their adopted country. By way of comparison, comparable fees in Australia and Canada are around $200. Anyway you slice it, it’s a lot of money and an understandable disincentive to apply for naturalization.

But if you are one of these 8 million legal residents who choose to forego making an application for U.S. citizenship each year -and if you are choosing not to apply for citizenship for economic reasons, I’d like you to take a few moments and reexamine that decision. Is it fiscally sound to decline U.S. citizenship on the basis of the application’s expense?

Although the status of a Lawful Permanent Resident (Green Card holder) never expires, the card itself does. All Form I-551 Alien Registration Cards (Green Cards) issued after August 1989 are valid for a period of ten years. Legal Permanent Residents are required to renew their Green Cards prior to their expiration. And the cost to renew the card is $370. Granted, the cost of renewing a Green Card is almost half the cost of applying for citizenship, but to think that filing a Green Card renewal application instead of a citizenship application will save you money is to apply a very shortsighted calculation.

Once you are a citizen, you are a citizen for life. Unless you renounce your U.S. citizenship voluntarily, you will find that it is very difficult to lose citizenship. As a Green Card holder, you are required to maintain certain residence requirements, and you may be deported for committing certain crimes. But as a citizen, you take your place with a sizeable, yet nevertheless elite, community of individuals with certain inalienable rights. Absent acts of treason, you may remain in this community for as long as you choose.

As a Green Card holder, you will need to renew that card every ten years for the rest of your life. If you file your first renewal application at age 35, you can expect to have spent at least $1,480 on renewal applications by the time you are 75 – and that is assuming that fees do not go up… and there is quite simply no chance at all that fees will not go up.

In September, 2009, Alejandro Mayorkas, the new director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that the agency is considering raising immigration fees again in the near future. This, despite the fact that the last fee increase, which represented a 69% hike, occurred less than two years ago. Although the number of US citizenship applications dropped 50 percent in the two years after the last fee increase, USCIS seems slow to suspect that there may be a connection between increased fees and a drop in applications, along with its proportional drop in revenue.

Regardless of when fees go up, you can rest assured that they will go up. And individuals who are eligible to file citizenship applications but who choose to postpone the expense are likely to find that the expense will increase sooner than later. Over the years, that $300 you save now by filing an application to renew your Green Card instead of applying for citizenship will be repaid to the U.S. government many times over.

All of which is to say: apply for citizenship! Apply now! Do not postpone this important step. The fact that there are millions of individuals who are living in the U.S. and who are eligible to apply for citizenship, but choose not to, fills me with a mixture of regret and awe at the promise of so much untapped potential.  Our country needs you. We need your vote, and your voice. Help shape the future of immigration reform and future policy. Search your resources and file your citizenship application soon, before fees get even more out of hand and out of reach. I wonder how many people who were eligible when the fee was only $90 have yet to apply for U.S. citizenship, and who will still have not applied when the fee is double what it is today.

Anti-immigrant sentiment goes by a lot of names. Most broadly, people who don’t want the presence of immigrants in the U.S. are accused of “xenophobia,” which is “an unreasonable fear or hatred of foreigners.” On a more localized level, individuals who disapprove of immigrants on the basis that they hurt the U.S. economy are termed “protectionist” and the most extreme opponents of an “open border” are sometimes referred to as “isolationist.”  But at what point does anti-immigrant sentiment become just another pseudonym for plain-old racism?

In a society that strives to seem politically correct, one must feel very secure in one’s company to voice opinions that denigrate a person or group of people solely on the basis of race. I have noticed, however, that the same taboo does not appear to apply to conversations about immigrants (and particularly illegal immigrants), where society seems to assume that “reasonable” minds might differ. Our comparative tolerance of anti-immigrant views has allowed remarks that disparage immigrants to become a convenient cloak for views that would not be tolerated if they were correctly identified as being fueled by racism.

Of course, racism and immigration law are hardly strangers to one another. Our country and countless others have a long history of restricting immigration on the basis of race. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred Chinese immigrants to the United States solely on the basis of race, is one of the most well-documented examples of the formalized exclusion policies that dictated admission at the turn of the twentieth century.

What is new, however, is the fact that the modern-day U.S. explicitly rejects race as a basis on which to talk about immigration, despite the fact that it serves as the bedrock on which so much anti-immigrant sentiment thrives. It may not be acceptable to exclude a racial minority from a restaurant or other public gathering place, but uttering epithets that tell groups of people to “go back to Mexico” or “learn how to speak English” are tolerated to the extent that they ultimately manage to exclude a specific racial group from participating in certain segments of American community. Likewise, when Americans make an exception to our blanket ideology of religious tolerance to objectify and harass Muslim worshippers, we unfairly isolate a specific racial group. In other words, anti-immigrant rhetoric achieves a social and cultural segregation that was previously achieved through overtly racist ideology.

In using anti-immigrant language to disguise a racist agenda, we are travelling down a slippery slope. I read recently that Denmark is offering immigrants from “non-Western” countries 100,000 Danish Kroners (around US $20,000) if they volunteer to give up their legal residency and return to their country of origin. And Denmark is not the only country adopting such a policy. Sweden, Ireland, Japan, Spain, and the Czech Republic all offer some form of remuneration for certain classes of immigrants who are willing to return to their home country. In Japan, this policy is reserved only for immigrants from Latin American countries. And while I feel ill-equipped to comment on the basis on which these countries have arrived at these policies, I feel a very strong sense of dread at what government- approved anti-immigrant policies may lead to.

Imagine if the United States publically declared a preference for “Western” immigrants above immigrants from any other country! Imagine if our government offered legal U.S. residents that were citizens of African, Asian, Latin American and Middle Eastern countries a sum of money as incentive to leave. Or that our country instituted a policy of religious tolerance to everyone except Muslims. Would we still recognize ourselves as Americans? Could we adopt such policies and still uphold the Constitution?

This past weekend our country celebrated an honored cultural tradition of giving thanks. And I am thankful that we live in a country that rejects principles of racism and white-supremacist ideology. But we will never completely abandon our history of state-endorsed racism until we have entirely rejected the habit of using anti-immigrant rhetoric as an excuse to discriminate against racial groups.

It is disheartening to see that, despite the fact that job losses have finally started to slow, the unemployment rate remains so high that the process of applying for a job is more difficult than ever.  I recently read that the U.S unemployment rate reached a staggering 10.2 percent in October. And the economy isn’t just affecting American workers in the U.S.

Immigration is down, and the number of foreign nationals seeking employment in the U.S. is at rock bottom.

All of which has gotten me thinking about this question that economists and policy makers are always debating: Do immigrants take jobs and opportunities away from Americans? Or would more foreign workers, visitors and immigrants result in a much-needed boon for our suffering economy?

I am neither an economist, nor a policy maker, and any conclusion that I reach on this subject will be biased (I will not deny it) by the fact that on a fundamental, intuitive level, expansive immigration policies seem like a good idea to me.  But I don’t think this makes my perspective any less valid. It only makes it more honest.  I really believe that immigration is good for the U.S. economy and I feel like I have only to look around the world that I live in to see evidence of that truth.

It really shocks me when I come across these so -called “impartial” researchers, the ones who compile volumes of statistics that “objectively” support the proposition that the employment of immigrants leads to the unemployment of U.S. workers.  And then, shockingly, seem to arrive at the same conclusion in every realm of the economic and political spectrum. Really? Immigration does not have one positive consequence for the U.S. economy? Is the benefit of an increased labor force contributing to Social Security and Medicare not worth mentioning? The benefit to U.S. industry of having employees at the top of the field insignificant? And providing U.S. employers with access to short-term and unskilled labor has no affect on the desirability of out-sourcing as an alternative to maintaining U.S. operations? Really?

I have a feeling that the economists that I refer to, if given the opportunity, would claim that their anti-immigrant agenda is fueled by the findings of their various studies on the subject, and not the other way around. But that strikes me as transparently self-serving. If “objective” parties who cannot find one redeeming quality in immigration are truly impartial, then the word has really lost all meaning.

I have not conducted a “study” to support my hunch that immigration is good for the U.S. economy, but I will offer you the following:

1. Immigrants = $ spent in the U.S.

Depending on which side of the debate you fall, you can find studies that show either that immigrants drain U.S. funding by using more government resources than they pay for in tax dollars, or, conversely, that the immigrant dollar is vital to the health of the U.S. economy.

I’ve already told you where I stand in the debate, so let’s look at the incontrovertible (to me) ways that immigrants stimulate the economy.

Immigrants pay taxes. And how dearly our country needs those tax dollars right now! Around the country, government-funded services are being terminated. Libraries, women’s shelters and low-cost medical service facilities are closing their doors. The tuition at state universities is going up and local school districts are facing drastic budget cuts. Frankly, we can use all the help we can get. The contribution that is made by foreign nationals who are living in the U.S. should not be held lightly. One recent estimate puts the amount of Social Security taxes paid by immigrants at $9 billion per year. And that’s just Social Security.

And immigrants don’t only pay taxes. Immigrants pay tuition that is not supported in any way by the U.S. government. In addition, the tuition that foreign students pay is often significantly more than the tuition paid by American students at the same school.

And how about the contributions of temporary visitors? Tourism is a vital industry for cities throughout the country. International visitors infuse much-needed capital into communities that depend on seasonal vacationers for their prosperity. Increased restrictions on obtaining visas make the U.S. a less desirable destination. And that is just not good for business.

And don’t forget that access to immigrant labor in the U.S. keeps many U.S. businesses located here, instead of outsourcing operations to developing countries with few to no labor laws and little regulation.

In general terms, a global presence in the U.S. is simply good business sense. I mean, have you ever heard of an isolationist country that was a hotbed for foreign investment?

2. Diversity is good

At the end of the day, I feel like where one stands on the immigration debate is a matter of how much you value diversity. And if you value it, I mean really value it, then you should support expansive immigration policies.

Diversity is good. It introduces a cross-pollination of ideas, perspectives, and cultural experiences, without which a society can become stagnant, bigoted, reactionary and isolationist.

The value of diversity distinguishes itself in the role it plays in schools and business. In both areas, the open exchange of diverse ideas and experiences has manifold benefits. In academics, a diverse student body leads to novel research, artistic inspiration and an unparalleled spirit of competition. In business, the ability to think outside of parameters defined by custom has lucrative benefits.

In both school and business, collaboration with foreign counterparts creates links that are vital to the ongoing success of the United States in the global economy.  The U.S. has educated foreign leaders and hosted some of the most influential business people in the world, as well the men and women who serve as the backbone of countries with which we do business and collaborate on global policy initiatives.

Our society recognizes the value of diversity by supporting programs that encourage the participation of racial minorities. As a society we respect the right to worship in a diverse number of ways. And we pay lip service to the idea that ethnic diversity is an integral part of our identity as a nation. But if we are to truly heed that national identity, then we must pay more than lip service. We must genuinely see the value of the contributions of those who come from around the world to join their families in the U.S., attend our schools, and work for our companies.

What is diversity, after all, but the ability to look beyond what you know, beyond your own experience, and find something that both mirrors and diverges from life as you know it? Diversity allows us to evaluate our choices outside the blanket of custom and convention, to find what we have in common with the people around us, and to identify what makes us unique. Diversity is the spark that inspires growth. It is good for communities, it is good for schools, and it is good for business.

The answer to our country’s economic woes does not lie with keeping immigrants out. That path will only take us farther down a steep decline that it will become increasingly difficult to climb out of. We need immigrants to help us generate the revenue to pay for services that we previously had the luxury of taking for granted. We need immigrants to compete with in our schools, so that the students whom we graduate will have the skills they need to successfully compete in the global marketplace. And we need to continue to welcome visitors from around the world, to encourage their interest in our country and our culture, their investments and their perspectives.

We would be foolish to close our doors so tightly against the world that the world stops knocking.