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the slackers approach to immigration status
Submitted by tacomasteve on Fri, 2009/11/06 - 15:57.
my last 90 day visa expired back in Jan 09 and I have been meaning to do the Costa Rica border bus turn around but always manaña. But I'm going to the USA soon and I wanted to get straight with immigration. I went to the main office in Managua around 8:30 AM fairly well versed in what should happen and which forms and copias I needed. The fine is 20 cords a day exactely you need to photo Copy your passport's ID page and the passport page w your Nica entry stamp, get and submit the standard form too. Window 24 for foreigners. Cordabas only and remember a pen. Four fairly short lines and less than an hour I was no longer "mojado". My fine, fees and an 5 day exit visa cost 5700 Cords.. I think this might be the easiest approach to the visa situaton. $285 a year. This 5 day exit visa is new to me and was not offered as a option at MetroCentro Oh and the main office has an Eskimo and American DoNut stand inside
an added bonus of the 5 day exit visa
on my way back to Nicaragua leaving Omaha on the back half of a RT thru Chicago & Houston, the United ticket counter rep asked about my immigration status I believe an attempt to force me to buy an exit ticket out of Nica but I was able to BS her that only residents and applicants get the 5 day exit visa stamp and pase adelante'..
Fine for a year?
Wouldn't that be $365/year, if you did it once a year? It's still tempting...I hate going off to CR.
Do you know what hours Migracion is open these days? Are they closing at 1pm like other gov. offices?
Residency Costs and Migracion Hours
Actually, residency is much cheaper than a buck a day penalties. A one yr residency is about $60 US and the five yr is exactly 3140 cords/ $157 US. Depending on which stream of residency you come in under, a "throw you out of the country" deposit may or may not be required and it ranges in price based on which country you are coming from.
New changes have recently taken place and there is now a Committee that consists of employees from Migracion, Intur, and the Ministerio of Hacienda. This group will now be deciding on who to accept here from the pool of qualified Intur applicants. I expect similar changes to direct Migracion cases. So, while once upon a time no one was scrutinizing your passport entries , things are changing. Now is not the time to be tempting fate if legal residency is your goal.
Also, remember that an extension of 1,2, up to 3 months can be bought relatively cheaply meaning one only has to leave twice yearly.
Migracion is open until 1pm but no one is let in after 11 am.
Nadene Holmes www.detailsmanagement.posterous.com
How unfortunate...
...that the US Embassy opens at 1pm and the Nica Migracion closes at 1pm and I have to go to both. Making it necessary to make two trips to Managua.
Residency
Why not just go for residency. I put it off for a while but it certainly makes life easier. Unfortunately, I still have needed to go to CR about twice a year.
why not residency?
Because it requires that I spend several thousand dollars to go back to the US and chase around the country getting a doctor to examine me and write a "health letter", and write for the police report and other documents that are not found near each other, get it all translated and "legitimized" plus paying for housing and transportation while there.
Most of my documents are from/in western Nebraska and the nearest Nica consulate is in Chicago, a thousand miles away. It is really much easier, for now, to go to CR.
AND, the "permanent" residency is only good for 5 years. With the political situation here as dicey as it is, who knows what the next governement will decide is good for Nicaragua?
Fishing for Excuses
Now it sounds like you are fishing for excuses. The reality is that it is possible to get your records without going back. Everything can be done by internet in combination with the mail. I had to re-do by criminal history, so I started with the internet. The notary retrieved and notarized the report, sent it to the State Capital (Department of State), then sent it to the Nicaraguan consulate in New York, then sent to me in Managua via DHL. It took two weeks exactly, and cost approximately $100.00. That included $40.00 for DHL, so if I had 3 documents, that would have been an additional $80.00 (give or take a few dollars). As for the health certificate, there is a way around that through MINSA. The problem is that I don't know that part of the process, and I don't even know if it is strictly legal, but I am certain that it can be done (I was told the cost is $15.00). The truth is that it is not really difficult, is not expensive, and doesn't take all that much time. Someone on this forum wrote about doing everything himself, including getting the translations and the entire process here in Nicaragua. I wish I could remember who it was, or how to find the entry. Two things I do know: 1) The translations can be obtained at UNAN. I spoke with the Department Head in the English department, and he said that the charge was $10.00 per page, and it takes about 3 days because they are not set up to do translations as a business; and 2) The authentication process is easy. The place was easy to find (although I couldn't tell you exactly how to get there) and I only waited about 20 minutes (my timing was good).
I have a lot of relatives who are lawyers, and they did most of the legwork for me, including the translations and several other legal documents; however, if I had known in the beginning what I know now, I would have done it all myself. Having people to help was nice, but that was not something that they normally do as a part of their business, so they had to squeeze it in between other work and various family crisis. I definitely could have done it much faster by myself. Another issue I had was very limited driving experience in Managua, but the last few months have emboldened me to the point where I now claim I can go almost anywhere without a guide.
Just my 2 cords worth.
No, not fishing for excuses....
If your memory improves to the point you have any real information to share, I would love to hear it. What you posted is too vague and speculative to be of any real help.
You say : "As for the health certificate, there is a way around that through MINSA. The problem is that I don't know that part of the process, and I don't even know if it is strictly legal, but I am certain that it can be done."
As I have no lawyers in my family, I have to rely on lawyers recommended to me by others. I have specifically asked Paul Tiffer about getting the health letter done here, since it has been a long time since I had a doctor in the US, but he apparantly doesn't know your secret. He has notified me of a service that can do some of the other requirements, but the health letter is the stumbling block for me.
Surely you can see that telling me you know something for certain, and then telling me that you don't know the details, is not helpful. I hope you are aware that some of the laws have just been changed, so what was true for someone else in the past may not apply now.
Tomorrow
It's not a question of memory because I didn't arrange it or get directly involved with it. All I know for sure is that the person we used produces. I will know more tomorrow after I talk to her, maybe. There's always a chance she won't be willing to divulge anything, and I'm not going to push except to try to understand any limits to what she does.
I apologize, but I had it a
I apologize, but I had it a little off. All she did was to get a letter from MINSA that was basically a health certificate. That was used along with a letter from me attesting to the fact that I was in Nicaragua from the time the original certificate expired to the current date. Immigration was reluctant, but they eventually accepted it after a strong argument and a little arm twisting. What I was thinking though is that it is not reasonable to expect a certificate from one's original country if they haven't been there for a while. It sounds a little like Phil's situation where they were expecting a criminal history check from the US when he hadn't been there (to live) for a number of years. Perhaps there is a similar solution for the health certificate, whatever that solution was. As for the content of the health certificate or the criminal history for that matter, I am not convinced that they pay much attention to that. I think they look primarily for all the right dates, stamps, and signatures. It's like the certificate that says you aren't married (for those who want to get married here). A letter with a signature and a Notary's stamp is as good as gold.
One correction
It wasn't that I hadn't been in the US to live, it was that I had not (and still have not) been there since 10 Jan 2002. So, I couldn't have even rushed in, committed a bunch of crimes and then left.
My experience (and that is not just with Nicaragua and not just with government) is that logic is not the right tool. That is, a logical argument seems to translate to you "wanting to disagree with the official". Instead, you need to offer alternatives that they can claim as their idea.
That doesn't necessarily mean saying "here are some choices, pick one". But, if you can make some semi-good suggestions that gets them on the path to selecting something close (that you might have actually thought was the best idea but didn't specifically suggest), you are a lot more likely to get somewhere.
Yeah, this approach sucks but it is sometimes the easiest way. As an example, I have a non-resident friend who is a signatory on a corporate account. But, he was told he could not open his own account. One day he ended up with a check in Euros. He asked as the bank what he could do and they said "oh, let's open a Euro account for you."
Health Certificate
I am sure it can be done. If the corruption level in government is even 10% of what we keep getting told, there is "a solution". I just don't happen to be the one that knows. When I did my residency, the requirement was actually different—it had to be a Nicaraguan Health Department certificate.
I do know one NL member that did the whole "go back and get it" trip but, with the costs involved, I would be looking for a "shortcut".
As for Paul Tiffer, I know him quite well. He is probably one of the few lawyers I have ever met (anywhere) that I would call honest. I would have no problem, for example, having someone send him a pile of money to handle for me. He is a good lawyer and he knows his business. That said, he is not the person I would ask about a "shortcut". That just doesn't match his honest lawyer M.O.
Keep asking and I expect you will find that shortcut and expect it to cost way less than $100.
Health cert for residency
I could swear I read that until about 2007 a note from a Nica doctor was all you needed for residency, but at that point they changed it to require the cert to come from your home country.
It's too bad, because keeping money in the country would help the economy, as well as encouraging people to go for legal residency. On the other hand, it sounds like many of these Nica certs were handed out for a small bribe, with no actual medical work being performed, so they probably weren't very accurate. On the other hand, why don't they just set up a government clinic that runs actual tests for whatever diseases they actually care about. They could charge a hefty fee for the convenience, and wouldn't have to rely on a document that could be forged.
And on my final hand, why is it ok for "diseased" people to come into the country and stay for years, as long as they leave for a few days once in a while, but not to become legal residents? Maybe the health requirement should just be abandoned. If only I were king of the world.
Taking it a step further
I am not sure where what the health certificate contents fits into the residency requirements. If, for example, it says you have a heart condition, does that mean you can't get residency? Even if you have some communicable disease, does that disqualify you or just require you to get treatment?
Note that the requirement here was a "Health Certificate from the Ministry of Health". That meant a trip to a government clinic. In Estelí the clinic doesn't have a lab so they give you a list of "approved labs".
I worked on the design of what was called the "Business License System" for the State of Washington. It was a political game which should have been called the "Safeway Licensing System" as it was created in response to a threat from Safeway and included only the licenses a Safeway store would need to open. In any case, the idea was to be able to "one stop shop" for what you needed—37 different licenses in the case of Safeway.
It would seem that "the right thing" to do here would be to turn the residency/citizenship process into one-stop shopping. One place that could first handle what you need, arrange the authentication at the Consulate of your "from country", validate the authentication, handle translations, offer the health check, ... It could even be staffed by people that spoke a few languages.
I know that I would have rather paid an additional fee to "just make it happen" that deal with a couple of false starts and multiple trips to Managua. Actually, one of the most irritating aspects of the current system is there is no "pending additional data" option. That means, for example, if you have all but one document, you cannot submit anything. The typical result is while you are waiting for the final document, one of the other ones expires.
Disqualifications
Right. If someone has athlete's foot or swimmer's itch, which are technically "communicable diseases", does it make any sense to ban them? What about cold sores or HPV, each of which are estimated to affect up to 25-50% (or more) of the population?
Looking at the other side, how could any doctor sign a paper saying someone is free of all communicable disease, when there are so many (one web site lists 92), many of which can be present without visible symptoms? It all just seems so unworkable.
5 day exit visa
The five day exit visa means you have 5 days in which to leave the country. After that you've overstayed again. The trick to what you've done is to go to migracion within five days of your planned departure date! Remember too.... here in Nicalandia they count the day you receive the visa and the day you leave as part of the five..... in other words you have three days to get your butt out of the country. While we're on the subject, and as a reminder, your original visa for 90 days is for 90 days (remember to count). Alot of folks assume that's three months. Arrive in any given month on a particular day and think you've got till that particular day three months down the road and you've overstayed your visa by at least 2 days. Paying 2 bucks for the two days isn't much money, but the half an hour of bullshit you go through with migracion "officials" (especially if you're on an early morning flight out of here) isn't the best way to start your day/flight. Migracion at the airport only excepts cords and nothing is open at MGA before 8 to change your dollars/euros. On another note (not hijackin' the thread here), if your ticket doesn't include airport taxes/exit fees the airlines collect those fees in cords too, not dollars. Now put all of your liquids in this plastic bag, empty your pockets and take off your shoes. Don't get upset. Just think..... in less than an hour you'll get to enjoy that yummy breakfast sandwich that looks like a dirty diaper with a $7 cocktail! LOL
Pura Nica, Bobby
Must be flying to the US
The only time I have ever had to take off my shoes was in Costa Rica to fly to Panama. I said "Hey, I'm not in the U.S. am I?" They weren't amused.
I am almost positive I paid the departure tax in dollars. But, that may be an airline decision--I was on COPA.
Juanno
Do you think they could hold this against you when you do apply for your residency?
good post,thanks for the info
thanks for the post..i have residence..but a lot of people ask me what happens with a over stay..now we know what to do
Options
It sounds easy/cheap but they can legally decide not to let you back into Nicaragua. That seems unlikely but if they have a reason they want to get rid of you, they could.
In Costa Rica, it is a bit stranger. Same 90 day visa stuff but there is no penalty for an over-stay. I went to get my Interpol check with my lawyer's sister. She had lived in Costa Rica for over 10 years, had a business and a kid there but would just overstay whenever she wanted. She finally decided it was time to get residency.
CR visa overstays
There may not be a penalty for an overstay in CR, but I do know of people who've been refused entry/reentry when they had overstayed their previous visas.
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Life is what happens while we're busy making other plans
I'll second that
When I was in CR a friend was telling me that she knows two people that had this happen. One was a long-term CR person with a business there.
I haven't heard of this happening in Nicaragua yet but, with a lot of "world political adjustments" I think it certainly could.