Government Hopes to Grant Residency to 10,000 Undocumented Migrants in 2017 Agencia EFE
go to original October 24, 2016

Mexico's government will carry out a program next year aimed at regularizing up to 10,000 foreigners now living in the country illegally, the INM migration institute told EFE.

"I'd like to arrive at 10,000, but we think if we can get to a number that's similar to what we reached last year that would be excellent," the director-general of INM's Migration and Immigration Registry department, Maria Fernanda Garcia Villalobos, said.

While no registry exists for the amount of immigrants living illegally in Mexico, the INM estimates they number between 10,000 and 15,000, meaning the goal is to regularize nearly all of them.

Some 3,300 people - out of a total of around 4,000 applicants - regularized their status under an earlier Temporary Migrant Regularization Program, or PTRM, in 2015, the first to be carried out following a 2012 immigration overhaul.

Most of the beneficiaries were from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, China, Cuba, Nicaragua and the United States. Forty-six Spaniards also obtained their immigration documents through the program.

The INM will launch a new PTRM on Jan. 9, 2017, and the program will run through Dec. 18 of that year.

It will provide a work permit and temporary four-year residence visa to foreigners - irrespective of their nationality - who entered the country prior to Jan. 9, 2015 and whose place of residence is Mexico even though their papers are not in order.

Beneficiaries will also be put on a path to permanent residency status.

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