Besserer Rayas et al. Comparative Migration Studies (2024) 12:47 extending the validity of passports for two years and then, again through government learning and awareness, increased this to 10 years. It is crucial to stress that with its reforms, the Colombian state catered to one specific group of displaced nationals, thereby closing implementation gaps resulting from unattainable paperwork requirements given the specific context of international displacement. However, these paper bridges remained exclusionary for other nationalities and their implementation further failed to include all Venezuelans, such as the hundreds of thousands who arrived after 2021 without a valid passport. While measures appear inclusionary, they can also have exclusionary features and effects (see Finn & Umpierrez de Reguero, 2020). Implementation has also been imperfect and patchy, e.g., the PPT often takes months to deliver, leaving applicants with an undefined status, and has been ineffective in creating access to some core services. Post-migration bureaucracy also remained too rigid, evidenced by half a million undocumented Venezuelans in Colombia. Temporariness also continued to be an issue since the PEP, the PPT, and the PEPTutor8 were enacted with temporary timeframes, as was Primero la niñez, which limited the pool of beneficiaries. And while legal status can be considered a necessary condition for successful integration and inclusion, it is not a panacea for Venezuelans, as they face growing xenophobia (El Diario 2024) and persistent obstacles in everyday life for instance, such as being excluded from key financial services such as credit (Asobancaria, 2023).9 Narrowing or closing paperwork gaps has also caused some restrictive bureaucratic backlash. For example, in 2021–2022, about 43,000 dual nationals were denationalized without having been granted due process rights based on perceived, though ultimately unproven, fraud or misrepresentation in their naturalization applications (Besserer Rayas, 2023; Besserer Rayas et al., 2023). However, it is unclear how the state retrospectively reviewed and determined who committed this alleged fraud, nor did the state inform these individuals of their stripped nationality (Becerra et al., 2022). The Colombian state has framed the changes as exceptional and temporary, hence subject to termination, though the temporary nature of the policies should not detract from seeing them as significant (for those who obtained nationality, there is little doubt that the policy was significant, for example). Executive-led documentation policies have the advantage of being flexible and can be passed without lengthy legislative procedures, but because they have not been enacted into law, they are inherently fragile, susceptible to changing political interests, and thus produce precarious rights. A recent example was the near reversal of the 10-year Venezuelan passport extension in Colombia (El Espectador, 2024). In normative terms, Colombia’s paper bridges can also be viewed more critically as extending state control in migration governance while satisfying contradictory, more liberal, impulses. Cook-Martín (2019) notes that temporary measures allow governments to satisfy contradictory interests, while leaving permanent arrangements for “more desirable” immigrants. For the Colombian case, Palma-Gutiérrez (2021) suggests that the executive’s response wanted to project an image of generosity while “consolidating the governmentality of migration”. This aligns with the regional tendency of a strong 8 PEP-Tutor was announced in late June 2024 by the Colombian government and would provide documentation to the irregular parents of children who obtained a PPT on or before August 12, 2023. 9 A digital wallet, Nequi, recently announced it would accept the PPT, which will ease exclusion. Page 16 of 20