Besserer Rayas et al. Comparative Migration Studies (2024) 12:47 the procedure impossible since the Venezuelan embassy and all consulates in Colombia closed. In June 2019, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent the Registrar’s office Communication S-GNC-19-029886, which included a memorandum on children who had been born since August 2015 to Venezuelan parents in Colombia who could not prove domicile. In this note, the Ministry of Foreign of Affairs stated that, “although they do have a right to Venezuelan nationality thanks to their ties to their parents, [they] face practical obstacles to acquiring that country’s nationality… in practice there are insurmountable obstacles that deny access to the right of Venezuelan nationality to these children” and therefore they “risk the condition of statelessness, in accordance with the definition of Article 1 of the 1954 Statelessness Convention” (RNEC, 2019, our emphasis). The impulse to adopt a blanket criteria came from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, while the Registrar was weary of overstepping its authority and becoming the target of criticism. The Border Management Unit, which had close ties to the president, eased these tensions and guaranteed that the Registrar’s office would be shielded from critiques (Interview with public official C). This led to the Registrar’s Resolution 8470 of 2019 whereby all children born to Venezuelans in Colombia between August 2015 and June 2021 would automatically attain Colombian nationality, as would those born within two years after the resolution (this timeframe has been extended an additional four years). This resolution implied a significant change to Colombia’s citizenship regime. It is extraordinary that it was applied retroactively; legal guardians no longer had to request it but rather it was completed ex officio. In addition to close collaboration between different state agencies, the Registrar received 2 billion Colombian pesos (circa half a million USD) of international aid from the IOM, UNHCR, and UNICEF designated to this program, allowing the state to hire almost 200 additional staff to modify archived birth certificates and to launch a robust communications campaign to inform the public – resulting in retroactively granting 29,285 children Colombian nationality (Mejía Ramírez, 2021; RNEC, 2023). Furthermore, Resolution 8470 also applied the new policy prospectively: from August 2019 onwards, all children born to Venezuelan parents in Colombia would be automatically granted Colombian nationality. Between August 2019 and April 2023, over 68,000 children of Venezuelan parents received Colombian nationality (RNEC, 2023); as of mid-2023, this totals 96,430 children who benefitted from this change. Congress passed Law 1997 in 2019 after the Registrar approved Resolution 8470. The law replicates what the Registrar had already implemented in practice, thereby granting legal legitimacy or legislative force to what had been only an administrative decision. While both were two-year “temporary” and “exceptional” measures set to expire in August 2023, the government then extended the Resolution for another two years (Moreno Sáchica, 2023). It is important to stress that the policy only applies to children born to Venezuelan citizens, and thus excludes the tens of thousands of children born to parents of other nationalities, such as undocumented Haitians (DW, 2021). 3. Changed naturalization processes Another paperwork gap occurred for thousands of descendants of at least one Colombian parent, who were seeking Colombian nationality after having migrated to Colombia as adults: the need to provide an apostilled birth certificate, described as “frankly Page 11 of 20