Filing your E-2 visa at the U.S. Embassy Mexico City

Never reschedule or cancel an E-2 appointment in the visa system. If you need to change the date, email the consular section instead.

This is worth stating first because the system will let you do it. The button works. What follows is not a moved appointment but a broken E-2 case, and there is no self-service route back. Treat the appointment as something only the consular section may change.

Substantiality and marginality get separate tabs here, where many posts fold them together. That separation is a drafting instruction in itself: the case that the investment is large enough relative to the business, and the case that the business will do more than support the investor, are answered in different places rather than in one continuous argument.

The page limit and the size limit are different constraints and are counted differently. The package may be 100 single-sided pages in total. Each email is capped at 25 MB, so a package within the page limit may still need to arrive in more than one message.

Where it does, number the subject line — "Surname, Given Name, Business Name, E-2 visa application (1 of 2)". PDF only: zipped or linked files are rejected because the consular section cannot open them.

The single-sided instruction is worth reading literally. It stops an applicant printing two pages per sheet to buy room, in the same way Frankfurt forbids double-sided printing.

The fee is paid through a Yatri account. That payment is valid for one year, and the biometrics appointment must be booked inside that window.

An applicant who pays early, then spends months assembling evidence, can reach the end of the window with the fee spent and no biometrics booked. Book the biometrics appointment against the payment date, not against your document readiness.

Mexico City reads the package before the interview rather than at it. The evidence therefore has to be complete when it is emailed, because there is no appointment date to work towards while the remainder is assembled.

Send the complete package to MexicoCityEvisa@state.gov.

We score Mexico City a 0 for third-country nationals, the bottom of our scale. It is a post built around applicants with a Mexican tie, and an applicant without one should expect difficulty being scheduled here.

The score describes willingness to schedule an appointment, not eligibility for approval. It is not a judgement on the merits of a case.

There is no single total. The MRV fee is fixed and published and paid through Yatri, and it expires a year after payment. Preparation costs vary with the case: business plan and projections, document assembly, certified translations, and attorney fees where counsel is involved.

Submission is by email, so there is no courier cost. Check the current published MRV fee before you pay.

The Department of State publishes current appointment wait times by post, and that is the figure to check. Because the package is reviewed before the interview, that published wait describes only part of your timeline.

Any post-interview administrative processing sits on top, and it is not uniform across applicants.

The E-2 is a nonimmigrant treaty investor visa open to nationals of countries holding a qualifying treaty of commerce with the United States, and Mexico is one of those treaty countries. You must have invested, or be actively in the process of investing, a substantial amount of your own at-risk capital in a real and operating U.S. business that you will direct and develop.

The enterprise must be at least 50 percent owned by persons holding the treaty nationality, or controlled by a qualifying national. A Mexican applicant’s own eligibility does not survive a non-treaty partner holding the majority stake.

One distinction to settle early: the E-2 is investment-based but offers no green card path, unlike EB-5, and it requires none of the prior corporate employment the L-1 does.