Besserer Rayas et al. Comparative Migration Studies
https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-024-00408-w
(2024) 12:47
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Comparative Migration Studies
Open Access
Building paper bridges: adapting citizenship
and immigration regimes to international
displacement
Andrés Besserer Rayas1* , Victoria Finn2 and Luisa Feline Freier3
*Correspondence:
Andrés Besserer Rayas
abessererrayas@gradcenter.cuny.
edu
1
City University of New York, New
York City, USA
2
University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
3
Universidad del Pacífico, Lima, Perú
Abstract
Implementation gaps in the areas of naturalization and immigrant regularization
emerge through a mismatch between the documents a residence country
requires, and the documents that refugees and migrants can realistically provide.
Those caught in this gap may live undocumented or risk statelessness. Residence
countries can close such paperwork gaps by adapting legal interpretations and
easing administrative requirements. When Colombia faced large-scale international
displacement from Venezuela, state actors identified documentation-based
implementation gaps in its nationality law and regularization procedures; they
then took an innovative – yet not faultless – approach by adapting its citizenship
and immigration regimes to accommodate displaced Venezuelans. These changes
strengthened access to essential rights and increased the well-being of many. In
this article, we develop the concepts of paperwork gaps and paper bridges and
discuss the actors, impact, and limitations of Colombia’s policy innovations in the
areas of nationality by birth, naturalization, and regularization based on research
conducted from 2020 to 2023. The study advances the literature on government
learning regarding policies within citizenship and immigration regimes that target
internationally displaced populations.
Keywords Citizenship regimes, Immigration regimes, Implementation gaps,
Government learning, Bureaucratic actors, Venezuelan displacement
Introduction
Since 2015, around three million Venezuelan citizens have settled in Colombia (R4V,
2024), a country that had previously been characterized as a country of forced emigration and internal displacement. Although its response to Venezuelan displacement
has not been free from contradictions (Del Real, 2022; Freier & Gómez García, 2022;
Selee & Bolter, 2022; Selee et al., 2024), the Colombian state took various notable steps
towards removing key administrative obstacles and thus facilitating access to legal status
for many internationally displaced Venezuelans. Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans
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