Qualified immigrants who want to become American citizens should be met with a warm embrace, not held at arm's length. And yet, absurdly, a nation bedeviled by illegal immigration continues to make life difficult for those it should be encouraging: people who are here legally and are ready to take the next step.

The cost of applying for citizenship rose last summer by 80 percent, from $330 to $595 (plus an $80 "biometrics fee" for most applicants), and the cost of a green card went up even more. The idea was to reduce backlogs by injecting badly needed revenue into the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

But 1.4 million legal immigrants completed naturalization applications last year - spurred in part by the advent of higher fees. That was twice the previous year's numbers, making the backlog worse, not better. The average wait has increased from seven months to more than twice as long, putting on hold the American dreams of hundreds of thousands of would-be citizens. In Maryland alone, 21,557 applications were pending at the end of 2007, according to the citizenship agency.

As troubling as the long waits are the exorbitant fees, which raise the question of whether we are establishing a wealth test for citizenship. Nobody should be prevented from becoming an American solely because he or she can't scrape together $595 - a princely sum by the standards of many of the countries that send us their immigrants.

It may be time to reconsider the long-standing philosophy that immigrants should pay the full freight for their path to citizenship. Even the harshest critic of illegal immigrants would have a hard time arguing that legal immigrants do not contribute greatly to our economy and culture, especially when they become citizens.

And with a giant wave of baby boomer retirements about to hit, we will be relying more than ever on immigrants to do the nation's work. Immigration officials seemed to recognize that this week when they moved to expedite green card applications for tens of thousands of people who have been stuck in limbo - and unable to work - waiting for completion of a background check.

That's a step in the right direction. The country simply can't afford to shut the door on immigrants. An aging America will need those eager, ambitious new citizens.