One of the most common fallacies when starting an immigration-related application is to immediately seek professional services for help, in the form of immigration attorneys. If you can afford it, it is absolutely great to have as you have a person who basically verbally interviews you, records all your information and also asks for all the necessary papers and documents, and then fills out all the application and other necessary forms for you. It saves a lot of personal research headaches and time to assemble applications.

But can you really afford a $400 an hour service? Typically, 80-100 hours are billed, bringing the total cost of an immigration application to anywhere between $5,000 and $30,000. Not only that, sometimes lawyers charge INS fees separately, so you may have to pay another $500 to $1000. And with attorneys, they are likely to choose the most expensive courier services, since you pay for them, and the costs keep rising.

It is never really necessary to hire an immigration attorney if your immigration case is very simple. By that, I mean he has nothing to hide, no heinous visa overstays, no illegal work for 20 years, and no criminal record. If you are a law-abiding person and have done everything legally, from coming to the United States on a visa that you legally applied for without false documentation, and living and working in the United States following the rules to maintaining your particular visa status, you really there is absolutely no reason to hire an immigration attorney. I also assume that if you are reading this article, you can read and write English at a level that you can understand and fill out immigration application forms.

There is much information freely available online, even provided by the attorneys themselves, to help you locate the correct forms and understand the correct circumstances for applying for each category of immigration. In addition to that, there are a variety of immigration forums where people, ordinary people who are not lawyers like you, come together and share their experiences and methods on the immigration process. Usually, with a few hours of online immigration research, you can have a pretty good understanding of what forms you’ll need and what documents you’ll need. After that, it is a matter of time and effort to submit the application and let the INS process the application through their processes.