New immigration laws and our resident visa

We are in the final stages of getting ready to pack up and drive down to live in Ajijic (after several exploratory visits), with a planned departure date of January 3. However we are struggling to understand the impact of the new immigration laws which supposedly went into effect Nov 1. Sounds like we need to apply for our Temporary Resident Visa (no more FM3) while still up here, that we can't just come on a tourist permit then switch over. Has anyone gone through this process since November 1 to tell us how to do it? We've done a lot of web research but no two articles seem to say the same thing, and our local Mexican Consulate website is unhelpful. We are going to make a visit to the consulate, but it would be helpful to know for sure what to bring ahead of time.

Any knowledge / advice would be greatly appreciated!

As it stands now, you will have to get the new Residente Temporal BEFORE you come, through the local consulate. So yes, you need to go there right away and see what they say. As a new applicant, you're stuck with the much higher income requirements for now.

If you come on tourist visas, you will have to leave and then apply for the Residente Temporal from there. So I would think you're better off biting the bullet and trying to get those visas before you come.

There are in-depth discussions of the new, and still evolving, rules on MexConnect and the ExPat forum. It's still pretty confusing, sorry to say.

There's also a lot of discussion about it here on this board:

https://www.insidelakeside.com/t6339p45-2012-imn-handbook-is-online#78435

Supposedly you can apply for either Temporal or Permanent resident at your local Mexican Consulate if you meet the financials. I believe they give you 180 days to cross the border but must check in with local immigration within 30 days to finalize.

Best checked with Consulate

Check www.rollybrook.com for full information.

Apply for visa at consulate where you are then register it within 30 days of arriving in Mexico, make sure you get some receipt upon entering Mexico so you can prove the date you crossed the border.

Thanks so much for all your replies. I have checked out the links and gained some new info. Our plan is to go to the consulate in the next couple of days. We are bringing proof of income and passports. Does anyone know of anything else we'll need?

Once we (successfully) go through the process I'll share it back with the group.

Thanks again!

You also need your birth certificates and marriage certificate (if you are claiming a spouse as a dependant). If in Canada, these certificates will need to be "legalized" by the consulate before they can proceed. Takes about 3 days.

OK. we'll bring birth and marriage certs. Our current strategy is to bring more than we think we'll need ... but knowing government bureaucracy, we'll probably still be missing something!

"...these certificates will need to be "legalized"
Read here for details: http://rollybrook.com/apostille.htm

Well, I said I would report back on our experience in getting a Temporary Resident Visa. We went to the consulate today and found the staff to be very friendly and helpful … which is a good thing, because I think we’re going to visit them several more times before we get everything right! Luckily we only live about 6 miles from the consulate. Many states have only one consulate for the whole state.

So after showing them what we had and chatting about what we needed (and yes, the woman working with us was fully bilingual; we spoke some Spanish with her for the practice but didn’t need to) we came away with a document specifying the following:

Passport – more than 6 months until expiration, plus a copy of each passport. We actually got this one right!

Income requirement. $1900 for first person in a family, $500 for each subsequent family member over the age of 16. We brought pension payment statements for Phil and bank statements for me. The documentation specifies that they want bank statements (3 months’ worth) but they seemed satisfied with the pension statements … except that they didn’t want any online printouts. We do all our banking online so have no originals and will have to order them. Same for the pension statements. Estimated time of arrival: 7-10 days.

Interestingly, the woman seemed to know nothing about the alternate income requirement of $95,000 in assets. She wanted to see monthly income. Luckily we have enough to meet the requirement, but I don’t know what we would’ve done if we’d needed to use our assets instead to meet the requirement.

“Statement of No Criminal Record.” The info sheet said we could obtain this from the sheriff’s or police department, but when we stopped by the police department they said they could only certify no criminal record in Sacramento. We didn’t think that would be good enough so did some web searches and found form 8016VISA issued by the state Department of Justice which was specifically for Visas/Immigration. We have no idea if this is the right form to get what the Consulate wants, but we duly filled it out and took it to a local Live Scan unit. This is a place that does fingerprint scanning and submits those with the form to the DOJ. Fee: $44 each (12 for the prints, 32 for the DOJ processing). Estimated time of arrival: 7-10 days. This will still only give us our criminal record for California, but given that it’s specifically meant for Visa processing we hope it will be enough.

Passport-type photos. We didn’t have them but they’re easy enough to get.

Filled-out Visa applications. We never were able to find these online but did obtain them from the consulate.

And copies of everything because we don’t know what we actually need to have copies of!

No mention was made of birth or marriage certificates, although they may ask for the marriage cert in order to verify household income. We are going to bring it … hope that doesn’t need any extra processing!

So once the records we need come, we’ll go back down and try again. If we make it through on our next visit she estimated a week or so for processing (perhaps slower due to the holidays) and then we have to come back in person again to pick up the visas. So probably "best case" to have our Visas is about 3 weeks from now.

I’ll let you know what happens on our next visit! Sorry for the long winded post but I wanted to share all the information as we obtain it.

You're doing great! Stick with it!

When we had to provide that bizarre "no criminal record" thing back in 1998, it came from a State Office (Washington State in our case). It was easy and we got it quickly. We could do the record search and pay for it on-line, then had to fax something to an official office which generated an official letter. Of course that was there and then.

The thing is: Whatever the (whoever it is) person across the counter asks you for....that's what you have to produce. That's the only thing that matters and it's great training for learning how to live in Mexico.

You sound golden at this point. Good luck with the rest of it!