Surely non-EU nationals have been fully aware of the terms and costs of moving to the UK, including getting a visa and so on, even before they moved here.
It's not about the cost per se, it's about the rules suddenly changing after we've been living here for years, and having to pay anything at all for something that used to be free when we had no say in the matter.
The rules have changed on non-EU immigrants repeatedly, often with little if any warning and with even less say, and we have to pay to keep up. I've only by chance recently found out that, technically legally, I'm in the grey zone because I legally changed my name a few years ago and didn't 'update my personal details' on my visa (but did with HMRC and everyone else) because under the ILR system I immigrated under, that was not a thing, you could and were encouraged to carry around the original visa with the documents proving the name change like marriage certificates even when you updated your passport, you carried the old one with the visa. I only found out because I'm currently trying to apply for citizenship and was on their website looking up the fee changes on their website.
So now, after living in the UK for 15 years, I'm now having to pay out again for something that used to come with having a ILR visa which is somehow still 'safe' enough to use to leave and enter the country, but not 'safe' enough to prove my right to work, study, access to any public services including the NHS as it used to be.
The UK government openly stated that it runs the Visa and Immigration services as for-profit for years now. When I immigrated here, naturalization cost around £300 (around the actual cost of current cost of processing for the government which £375 according to freemovement.org.uk). It's now over a grand more expensive (it's gone up over £400 in just the last 5 years, the typical length one has to wait from starting the immigration process to even begin trying for citizenship), plus the cost of the test, plus the cost of biometrics, neither of which were a thing when I immigrated nor things I got a say in when they happened.
I would gladly jump at the chance to pay £65 rather than over £200 for a Biometric Resident Permit or well over a grand for citizenship. £65 probably isn't even going to cover the cost of the immigration lawyer I now feel a need for because I've been caught out by so many changes that I no longer trust myself to do these citizenship forms myself (and it doesn't cover the fees most councils charge just to photocopy documents and check the forms are filled in without any specialized advice).
Yeah, the changes for EU nationals suck and I doubt the UK government is any better planned on dealing with the influx or the database than they are for a lot of the rest of Brexit. I just find the way people are dismissing non-EU residents and the issues we're going through quite frustrating. Many of us, just like the EU nationals, did our best and played by the rules when we came over and have been shafted repeatedly and made to pay up repeatedly. We pay and then are repeatedly told to pay more or bugger off because being hard on immigrants is a sure vote winner as can be seen with this mess.