His plans are to get more funds and expand the programs to other counties

by Araceli Martínez

Almost seven months after assuming the position of executive director of Mission Neighborhood Centers (MNC), Richard Ybarra revealed that he feels very comfortable.

“I am where I want to be, where I should be, where life brought me,” he said in an interview with El Reportero.

Ybarra replaced Sam Ruíz, who retired from the position 40 years after working for Mission Neighborhood Centers.

What were the most pressing issues he encountered on March 1 when he took over MNC?

“I reached the best organization of my career. The quality is high and I have a great team.”

But two or three weeks later, Richard realized that the Mission Neighborhood Centers name needed to be promoted further.

“We have an organization that has done so much work with such success, but we do it under various names, but not under our own name.”

So he set about asking the people they bring food to if they knew where it came from. “It comes from the government, they told me, but no one mentioned our name.”

The same thing happened with the Head Start program, too. “I spoke to 90-something parents, and they told me how much they loved Head Start, but never mentioned our name.”

As a consequence, in the coming months, the new leader of the MNCs said that they will work so that the area where the name of the organization is located appears on all campuses.

Communication failures

Richard said another problem he observed is communication. “So many years of effort and services, but we have not communicated them to the community. We want to change that so they know what we are doing.”

He showed that they also seek to diversify their funds.

“Apart from the government funds that reach us in amounts up to 24 million dollars per year, we want to seek resources without restrictions. For that we need to spread our story, so that high-income people know what we are doing and support us.”

What most pressing problems have you encountered in the community?

“In any year, the situations poor people live under are important and significant. During the pandemic, their problems increased. In this city, the cost of living is the highest in the entire state. It is very difficult to be poor in San Francisco.”

And he adds that the displacement of Latinos continues. “What happens with the high cost of living is that many families are moving out of the Mission neighborhood because it costs a lot to live here.”

He noticed it himself when he moved his family from San Diego to San Francisco.

“From my point of view, the cost of living is almost double between San Diego and San Francisco. A haircut costs $18 there, $38 here; a car wash, there $15, here $28 or $30. The cost of rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $2,900 in San Diego; and here of $3,900 or more.”

But even though the problems have grown with the pandemic for Latinos, he acknowledged that he is comforted to know that at the same time, the efforts of families to survive and face all obstacles are growing. “Organizations like ours also look for a way to assist them.”

Have you noticed an increase in homeless Latinos in San Francisco?

“Maybe yes, but there is an explanation. Unlike other groups, precisely because of the high cost of living, Latinos are one step away from being homeless. Technically there would be more homeless on the streets, if not because we live in a living room, a car, a patio, a garage, a bedroom. By living in these circumstances, Covid touched us more.”

What will be your priorities for the remainder of the year and 2022?

“I have seven months, and almost eight months in the position. At nine months, I will begin to form new plans for the coming year. Now we want to continue with the programs that we have, to continue helping the elderly, the young and with the preschool programs,”

He said that under the rental assistance program, they distributed more than $3 million to 400 families, many of them elderly.

One of his plans is to seek more non-government funds to start programs and help people in other counties like San Mateo, Contra Costa, Monterey.

“Groups from those counties have approached us and we are exploring moving out of here a bit. We hope to be able to help more in the future.”

Currently, he said they help 15,000 people a year, but he would very much like to expand and assist 30,000. “The need is growing and our capacity must grow to help more families.”

Therefore, he indicated that his priority is to continue with what they have to expand immediately.

In recounting the seven months that he has led the Mission Neighborhood Centers, Richard said that he has not had a bad day. “This job is the dream of my life. Never in my life until I

A status regularization program has helped some foreigners stay in the country during COVID

by Rose Egelhoff

What would you do if you could not go home? That was the question many foreigners in Mexico faced during the pandemic, as some borders closed and others imposed expensive quarantine restrictions.

For incoming Americans and Canadians, getting a visitor’s permit to enter Mexico can be as easy as buying a flight or making a quick stop at the border. But when it comes to extending their stay, the same Americans, Canadians and others foreigners ordinarily have to leave the country, which can be difficult during a pandemic.

Luckily, in light of COVID-19, the Mexican government opened up a special status regularization program for foreigners. Under the standard process of applying for residency, the first of several steps occurs at a Mexican consulate in the applicant’s home country.

Under the special regularization program, travelers with expired visitor’s permits could obtain four-year temporary residency without leaving the country — a lifeline for many stranded expats. That together with a national-level effort at the National Immigration Institute (INM) to streamline and digitize the immigration process appears to have led to a vastly improved experience for many seeking to regularize their status.

One such stranded expat was Jen, a Canadian art dealer who fell in love with Mexico and now sells Mexican folk art online. She asked that her last name be withheld to speak openly about being in Mexico without proper documentation. Jen arrived in October of 2019, but had trouble leaving the country before her visitor’s permit expired.

“My visa originally expired in April but my flight was canceled and so my lawyer got me a one month visa extension and then because my flight was still canceled, she got me another extension till January. At that point in time they said not to really worry about it, just pay the fine when you leave the country,” she said.

Then she heard about a visa program available in Querétaro, which allowed certain foreigners to replace their expired Forma Migratoria Múltiple, the visitor’s permit also known as an FMM, with a four-year temporary residency card.

“When this whole program started, I was actually really sketched out … it sounded too good to be true,” Jen said.

She was particularly worried by rumors of deportations and increased immigration enforcement, since she had all her belongings with her in Mexico and hoped to stay in the country. To be safe, she waited three months, until April of this year, without hearing any reports of negative experiences with the visa program.

“So at that point I felt a little more safe going and doing this, but it was a risk,” she said. “I went to the bank that morning and paid [the National Immigration Institute] over 13,000 pesos, not knowing whether I actually going to get approved or not.”

Luckily for Jen, her application went smoothly. With limited travel options for returning to Canada, she was granted four-year temporary residency and later successfully applied for permission to work. She said her application was easy; she only had to wait half a day at the immigration office to get her residency card.

John, a Mazatlán-based Canadian, has been in Mexico for several years, and also struggled to return home as his FMM expired during the pandemic. Like Jen, John asked that his full name be withheld to openly discuss being in Mexico with an expired permit.

“It is definitely hard to get back to Canada right now. There are no direct flights. There is a lot of travel time to get back to my city,” he said, adding that Canada’s hotel quarantine policy for returning citizens could cost up to CAD $2,000, prohibitively expensive for many. The quarantine policy has been amended since John received residency, and travelers who have been fully vaccinated with an approved vaccine are now exempt.

John heard about the immigration regularization program on Facebook.

“I love living here so I decided to check it out,” he said. “My experience with the immigration institute was great. The whole process took only 3.5 hours so I feel very lucky.”

Guy Courchesne, the director of Teachers Latin America, works on immigration issues as part of his business recruiting foreign teachers. He said he first heard about the pandemic regularization program in February, but that it was not the first time the Mexican government had instituted such a policy.

“This is something they do every five years …”Courchesne said. “It’s a way to put amnesty out for all the people who are here illegally. [It’s] usually aimed at Central Americans more than anything else, but this year was the COVID twist. We were seeing, for example, Americans, Canadians, a lot of Australians because they are stuck, Europeans coming in to make use of it. That’s what’s a little bit different about it.”

Availability of the program seems to vary between locations, with some immigration offices not offering the program to people whose home countries have open borders and flights available. In other places, applicants report being quickly approved.

Courchesne said the most common program applicants were Canadians and Australians. Canadians faced a required two-week hotel quarantine, on their own dollar, and Australia had implemented caps on the number of flights into the country, making it difficult for some of their citizens to return.

Courchesne and other immigration consultants said the greatest challenges for visitors seeking to access the pandemic regularization program were the language barrier and bureaucracy. Though the INM has begun to digitize many of its processes, leading to faster processing times, Mexican bureaucracy still functions differently than what many foreigners are used to in their home countries. And navigating such a system in a foreign language complicates an already byzantine process.