When you apply for refugee status in Mexico, you are first given visitor status for humanitarian reasons. You are not yet a refugee, but you are no longer a traveler, and have the opportunity to stay in the country until the expiration date of your visitor card. This is about a year. Refugee status will most likely be denied; for this reason, sooner or later the question will arise of how to obtain resident status in Mexico in order to stay in the country.
You can leave Mexico and come back again. There are no restrictions on entry after refusal of refugee status. And able to change the status of a humanitarian visitor to a resident status without leaving Mexico. The latter is permitted only in a limited number of cases: childbirth in Mexico, marriage to a citizen or resident of the country, or an invitation to work from a Mexican company. We’ll talk about residence by invitation to work.
Key point — you must have a plastic visitor card.
If you only have paper proof of visitor status (Documento provisional de visitante) but no visitor card itself, you will have a difficult time changing that status to Mexican resident status. We can help in this matter.
As a humanitarian visitor, you already have a CURP identification code and a work permit, although you cannot purchase an RFC tax number. Accordingly, to obtain a residence permit, it is enough to provide an invitation to work from a Mexican employer registered with the migration service and having permission to hire foreigners. The document must contain information about the employer, an indication of your specialty in this job, the duration of the contract, information about the criteria for work and payment, etc. In other words, it is enough to find a Mexican employer who will enter into a long-term contract with you, and this will give you the prospect of obtaining residency status upon invitation to work.
This is very similar to obtaining a residence permit through a work visa, with the difference that you do not need to obtain a visa at the consulate and you also do not need to leave Mexico. But in both cases, the main difficulty is not so much to find an employer, but to get him to issue an invitation to work in the migration service. Moreover, this acquisition process should be handled not by you, but by the employer himself.
It is advisable to change your status as a humanitarian visitor to the status of a Mexican resident before the Commission for Refugee Assistance (COMAR) makes its decision on your application for refugee status (if you know that it will be negative), but it is possible after your application has been refused. In the latter case, you must meet the number of days specified in the received order to leave Mexico. Usually this is 20 days, during which you are unlikely to have time to complete your residency status. These 20 days cannot be extended, and after they expire, you lose protection and may be deported from the country.
Citizens of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus are currently not being deported from Mexico due to the war in Ukraine, and you are able to remain in the country until the expiration date of your temporary visitor card. However, this does not solve the problem of how to legally stay after the temporary visitor card is no longer valid.
We provide services for selecting a Mexican employer and changing status from a humanitarian visitor to a temporary resident upon invitation to work. The entire process takes approximately two months and ends with the issuance of a temporary visitor card for a period of 1, 2, 3 or 4 years. From this moment the countdown of 5 years begins until you obtain Mexican citizenship. After 4 years as a temporary resident, you must obtain a permanent resident card, which does not expire.
Unlike acquiring a residence permit through a work visa, to change a humanitarian visitor card to a temporary resident card based on an invitation to work, you do not need to leave the state and you do not need to have an education diploma. Proficiency in Spanish or English is also not required.