Besserer Rayas et al. Comparative Migration Studies (2024) 12:47 Venezuelans in Colombia. This policy modified the norms around nationality transmission on a massive scale; it retrospectively modified the status of children born in Colombia as well as prospectively changed the rules for those born in the future. In the context of this reform, Colombia explicitly recognized Venezuela’s diminished capacity to produce official documentation. Towards the end of 2016 and beginning of 2017, several international organizations (e.g., UNHCR, IOM), state agencies, and news reports noted that children were being born without obtaining any nationality. An intersectoral group was established in 2016 within Colombian state agencies to craft solutions to ongoing issues stemming from recent immigration. Among others, this group identified the issue of potential statelessness among the children of irregular Venezuelan immigrants (Mejía Ramírez, 2021). Interviews with officials who participated in the decision, as well as a report published by the Registrar, strongly suggest that there was robust coordination and deliberation among key agencies – namely, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Registrar, Migration Unit, and Border Management – within the executive power, in communication with then-president Iván Duque (2018–2022) who showed a keen interest in finding a solution by establishing a working group for migration (Interview with public official C). The intersectional group suggested a change in the National Registrar’s procedure for determining whether a child born to Venezuelan parents could forgo proof of domicile. Circular 168 was adopted by the Registrar’s office in 2017, allowing Venezuelans to show that their Colombian-born child was stateless. Following this procedure, the Registrar’s regional offices sent the file to the nationality working group in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – an ad hoc inter-agency group established to study naturalization policy implementation. The working group would then issue a written consultation to the Venezuelan embassy or one of its consulates asking whether the child was a Venezuelan national. If the response was negative or if there was no response within three months, the child was considered stateless. The working group would communicate this finding to the Registrar, which placed a seal on the child’s birth certificate, making him or her eligible for Colombian nationality, thus creating an exemption from proving domicile (RNEC, 2017). This initial procedure was “piecemeal and slow” (Interview with public official C) hence many children born to Venezuelan parents in Colombia remained de facto stateless. Bureaucrats identified the procedure as problematic since it involved too many steps and had to be initiated by the parents, who likely did not even know about the procedure. A key administrative bottleneck was contacting Venezuelan consular services about each application, exacerbated by very low response rates. The procedure was also inefficient and required that a new bureaucratic office within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs be charged exclusively with these communications (Interview with public official C). By 2019, the National Registrar had found 25,400 children who had been born to irregular Venezuelan immigrants in Colombia, thus making these children stateless (RNEC, 2019) and only relatively few (“a hundred per week perhaps” [Interview with public official C]) were ever issued with the writ demonstrating statelessness, which would then allow them to obtain Colombian nationality. Furthermore, in January 2019 the Colombian and Venezuelan governments cut diplomatic ties, rendering however, the law obliged parents to obtain written proof from their diplomatic mission stating that the child did not have a right to the parents’ nationality (Law 962 of 2005). Page 10 of 20