If you are worried about successfully passing through passport control upon arrival in Mexico, we note that it is completely unimportant what airline you flew on and from what country you arrived from. Of course, those flying in from the United States rarely have problems. In other cases, you will be checked the same whether you arrived from Russia, Europe or Latin America. But at the same time, the attitude towards you from a migration officer at any airport in Mexico will largely depend on your citizenship and the extent to which you are able to confirm your travel intentions, both in appearance and documents.
Mexico, like any other country in the world, delegates specific functions of a migration agent to airlines. According to Art. 42-43 of the Mexican Migration Law, airlines are required to electronically transmit to the migration service lists of passengers, their passport data, as well as information about their migration document (visa) and planned time of arrival even before arriving in the country. Similar information is transmitted before the flight from Mexico. Airlines are responsible for ensuring that the information provided is accurate. Consequently, the migration officer at passport control, having scanned the passenger’s passport, sees on which flight and from which country he arrived.
After several high-profile publications in the Mexican press about the biased attitude of the migration service towards passengers with passports of Romania and Colombia, Mexican officials justified that the enhanced checks of citizens of these countries upon entry to Mexico are related to the so-called “security protocols”. That is, when scanning a passenger’s passport, a certain message will be read on the migration officer’s monitor screen, after which the passenger undergoes an enhanced check. The press writes quite regularly about the Romanian mafia in Mexico, and in this regard, the attitude towards the Romanians is understandable. But we cannot exclude that the same «security protocols» are also activated when passing through passport control by citizens of the CIS countries. (Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, etc.), many of whom have clear immigration intentions towards the United States. The Romanian Foreign Ministry made a loud statement about the unfair treatment of Mexico's migration service towards its citizens, after which Mexico's Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard was forced to apologize and report that «security protocols» will be revised. The Ministries of Foreign Affairs of the CIS countries did not make such statements. Besides, Romania — a country that the European Union will look after, but no one will look after the CIS countries.
Moreover, it does not matter which international terminal of the Mexican airport you arrive at. There is an opinion that passengers arriving at Terminal 2 of Cancún Airport are checked less than those arriving at Terminals 3 and 4, while in Mexico City those arriving at Terminal 1 are checked more thoroughly. We do not agree with this opinion. This opinion can easily be explained by the fact that some terminals receive more passengers with a certain citizenship, while others receive fewer. Accordingly, the number of additional checks in some terminals will be greater, in others — less.
So, it doesn’t matter what route you take to Mexico, a direct flight from Moscow or a connecting flight through Europe or Istanbul, and what terminal your flight arrives at. Ancillary checks are available for passengers on any international flight and at any terminal. These checks are always random, and most passengers enter Mexico without problems.
However, from which country you arrived to Mexico depends on where you are taken from, provided that you are denied entry. We talked about this in one of the previous publications.