Raising the price on immigration?

This story is about how immigration officials are facing a huge budget shortfall is considering raising the fees associated with the immigration costs significantly.

What struck me about the article was where it mentioned that the immigration group has to be self supporting. It almosts sounds like a government function is being passed off to a private sector type of organization but without a profit motive. Beyond the obvious problems of raising already high fees (which would lead many people to not immigrating at all and some to just go ahead and enter illegally) I worry about the commodification of the movement of people. I think it says a lot of negative things about our immigration process where one of the biggest hurdles is if you can pay enough in fees in what basically amounts to paperwork. Not to mention the apparent short sightedness of a plan that many people already believe to have caused a severe drop in applications in the first place.

From reading this I would hope that in the next round of the immigration debate in Washington that begin a top to bottom transformation of all the government immigration angencies so that the agency is able to make people (rather than the bottom line) the bottom line.