Getting Our Mexican Temporary Resident (Residente Temporal) Visas – Part 2

Due to the gas crisis that was occurring in Mexico when we
arrived, we were delayed in the city of Leon for a week before finally arriving
in Guadalajara. Then we wanted to jump right in to language school, so it was
almost 3 weeks before we finally made it into the immigration office in
Guadalajara.
Step 3: Visit the
Immigration Office in Mexico
We found the Mexican Immigration page online, downloaded the
in-country immigration forms we needed, and filled them out. We dutifully made copies
of our passports and had more passport photos taken at a (rather pricey) photo
studio in Tlaquepaque. We then arrived at the Immigration office a few minutes
before it opened and showed the greeting staff the forms. They gave us a ticket
and showed us where to sit. We were quickly called up to a window and showed
the woman our paperwork (no English spoken there). She didn’t like my paperwork
since, as I had been warned at the Mexican Consulate in Denver, I needed to use
my full and complete name for everything. (Lisa, who had filled out the online forms,
had not been aware of this.) I was sent to a computer kiosk to refill it, not a
pleasant experience, as everything was in Spanish and a line was forming behind
me. Nonetheless, I was eventually successful. Lisa joined me in the line to
redo hers for another picky reason.
Back at the window, we were given another document that we
needed to immediately take to a bank, where we would pay approximately $200
each, obtain a receipt, and return to Immigration.
Step 4: Pay the Fee at
a Local Bank
We walked a few blocks to find a bank, took a number, and sat
in the waiting area. Mexico is basically a cash society, so people go to banks
with cash to pay their bills – water, electric, cable, phone, and, in our case,
Immigration payments. There’s almost always people waiting in the chairs. When
our number was called, we went to the window and showed the form we were given.
The Immigration woman told us that the receipt we got from the bank had to have
our names EXACTLY as they were on our passports. The bank’s system wouldn’t
allow the hyphen in Lisa’s last name (Hamm-Greenawalt), so she is Lisa Hamm
Greenawalt in Mexico.
Step 5: Back to
Immigration
Returning to the Immigration office, we waited until the
woman who had previously helped us was available, and gave her our receipt. She
took that, along with our copies and the Immigration permit we got at the
border, and told us that we would get an emailed approval in one or two weeks.

Lisa and Lexie got their emails in a week. We emailed it to
Lisa’s Mexican friend in Evergreen, Gabriela, to confirm that the dense
legalistic language in Spanish said we were approved. She said yes!

But mine didn’t arrive until a week later, causing a bit of anxiety.
We were each given an official Mexican identification number called a NUT, for
Numero Unico de Tramite.
But we weren’t finished.
Step 6: Photos and
Fingerprints
We now had to go back to the Immigration office again to get
our fingerprints taken and give them photos, since they deemed that photos we
had submitted earlier in the process were slightly too big. So we got a new set
of photos taken (in the designated “infantil” size), and scheduled to take
another morning off from language school to finish the process.
We again arrived at Immigration right before it opened, got
our tickets and were shown to a different set of seats. Lisa went to one window
and Lexie and I ended up going to another. They accepted Lisa’s photos and took
her fingerprints, giving her one small napkin to get the purple ink off her
fingertips. They also accepted Lexie’s photos, but not mine. They said the
white background, which looked pale gray, was too dark and I needed to get new
photos again.
First we went to the bathrooms to try to scrub the
fingerprint ink off our fingers! In the Men’s Room, a man sprayed my hands with
some solution and gave me paper towels, so I was fairly successful. Lisa and
Lexie didn’t get the same treatment in the Women’s Room so they had to work
harder, and Lexie’s fingerprints were purple for a day or two.

Then we went in search of a nearby place to get photos taken,
found one a couple blocks away, and went back to the Immigration office with
the new pictures. Success!
 Then they told us to
come back in a week for our Temporary Resident (Green) cards.
Step 7: Temporary
residents!
A week later we went back to the Immigration office a third
time. Once again, very efficiently, we got our numbers, got called to the final
issue and signed for our Green Cards.
Finally, six months after the first visit to the Denver
Consulate and 6 weeks after we crossed the border, we held our Mexican Green
Cards in our hot little hands! We were officially Temporary Residents of
Mexico.

 

Celebrating the success of the process and our new status as temporary Mexican residents!

Getting Our Mexican Temporary Resident (Residente Temporal) Visas – Part I

Whether you realize it or not, every time you visit Mexico you’re required to have a Visitor’s Permit or a Visa. Most people get a Visitor’s Permit, which is the form you fill out on the plane. Included in your ticket price is the $25 fee for this permit, which is valid for 180 days.
Since we planned on staying in Mexico for longer than 180 days, we had to obtain a Visa. We applied for a Temporary Resident (Residente Temporal) visa, which would allow us to stay in Mexico for 1 year (renewal for up to 4 years) and allow us to import our car (a blog post on that at a later time). This Visa requires that we meet certain asset/income requirements: have monthly income equal to 300 days of the Mexican minimum wage or $30,804MX or savings/investments equal to 5,000 days worth of the minimum wage or $513,400MX. The deciding factor for us was that because we wanted to import our car, because we were bringing the cats with us. So we decided on the Temporary Resident Visa instead of the Permanent Resident Visa, which would not allow us to import our car.  
This ended up being a 7-step process for us.
Step 1: Denver
We started in the Mexican Consulate in Denver. We knew that once we the Visa was issued, we would have to cross into Mexico within 6 months. Since we knew that we would be traveling for several months, and to allow for any unforeseen issues, we thought that getting the Visas in August would be good for our planned January entry to Mexico. I had read about other people merely walking into consulates to start the process. Therefore, about a week before I wanted to go to the consulate, I went to check on the consulate hours so we could get there first thing in the morning. To my complete surprise, I discovered the Mexican Consulate in Denver only processed Visa applications by appointment. To make matters worse, they only had 3 available slots in mid-September, very close to when we were planning to leave Denver. They weren’t together, but we grabbed them, signing up online and printing the forms we needed for our appointments.
Lexie and I had our appointments on the same day. It was a bit of a culture shock at the consulate, as everyone spoke Spanish and we didn’t (yet). We were shown some chairs to sit in and watched the very orderly process of Mexicans taking care of their business at multiple bank teller-like windows. A woman came out and took Lexie and me into a back room. She couldn’t find my appointment and subsequently taught me a very valuable lesson – I needed to include my full name on everything Mexican. That includes my middle name, Keefer, and my suffix, III. She took my financial verification data and sent us back out to pay our $36 Visa fees while she found my appointment and verified the info I had given her. Because I had given my full name on the online form, she needed to create a completely new appointment with the full information. This made the process take longer than it should have. She was extraordinarily nice, and fortunately spoke English. We got our mug-shot photos taken and signed some unknown forms, then called back into the office 20 or so minutes later and given back our passports, which now had the Visas in them.

Lisa went to the consulate 10 days later and came home with her Visa. (Note that different Consulates have different procedures and requirements than what we experienced in Denver. Check your local Consulate!)

Step 2: Border Crossing
The second step of our process came when we crossed the border into Mexico in January. We knew we couldn’t get the normal tourist permit, which would invalidate our Visa. Therefore, we very carefully showed our Visas and made sure that our immigration form was marked accurately, giving us 30 days to visit the Immigration office in Guadalajara.

Lexie filling out her paperwork

This is the form we needed to have marked correctly

Next … Part 2, The Mexican part!

Mexico Visa Day

(Written in September 2018) 

Today, Lexie and I got our Mexican Visas. Normally, when you go to Mexico on vacation, you automatically receive a visa that is good for 180 days. Since we will be staying longer than that, we needed to get a Temporary Resident Visa that is good for 1 year and renewable for up to 4 years.
To receive that visa, we needed to make copies of birth certificates and passports, create a letter in Spanish detailing our Mexican address, get passport photos, and have documentation that proves that we can financially support ourselves when we get there.
Once you get the visa in the US from a Mexican consulate, you have 6 months to enter Mexico and then another 30 days to finish up the requirements in Mexico.

Since I had read about other people going to their local consulate and getting their visa, I began the process in August, five months before our scheduled arrival in Mexico, and blocked off a day to spend waiting in an endless line waiting to be processed.

When I researched our local Denver consulate, I discovered that they only processed visas by appointment and that the only appointments available before we left were in September, during the week we were planning on packing and moving. The only other alternative was to wait until we were back east and then spend a day traveling to the consulate in Philadelphia and waiting in an endless line there. We decided to get the appointment in Denver. They had 2 appointments available one day and then another 3 days later. We took them.

The process was very smooth and organized. They took Lexie’s and my documentation, we paid our fee, got photographed and finger printed and got our visas.

It did take a bit longer than it should have because of a mistake I made when signing up for the appointments. I’m pretty loose with my name. I almost never use my middle name or initial and rarely use the suffix. Because I only used my first and last name when signing up for the appointment online, when they took my passport they couldn’t find me in their system because the Robert Greenawalt who signed up was not the same person whose passport they had, which also had a middle name and III at the end. After they informed me that I always had to use my full name when in Mexico, the consulate person re-entered my name and got us our visas. Total time was 3 ½ hours, including driving and a stop to get Lexie’s passport photo. Not bad!

Lexie and I are ready to go. Lisa will get hers in a few days.

(Postscript: Thanks to Bob’s experience, Lisa had her middle name on all paperwork and the process took less than an hour. She notes that they do their best to make you look as unattractive as possible in the photo. Remove glasses. Push hair behind ears and off forehead. Don’t smile. Consequently, this is the mug shot to end all mug shots.) 

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