Besserer Rayas et al. Comparative Migration Studies (2024) 12:47 preference for temporary and ad hoc regularization (Acosta & Freier, 2023), where rights-based approaches are also a means to increase state control (Brumat, 2021). This coincides with what several former state officials and NGO staff in Colombia relayed as the motivations behind Colombia’s paper bridges. The cases of Colombia’s paper bridges nonetheless showcase how receiving states with little experience and limited established capacity can creatively adapt their citizenship and immigration regimes in international displacement contexts. The bridges reduced the size of undocumented populations and increased immigrants’ and refugees’ access to naturalization, legal status, and essential rights. Within this process, the relevant actors we identified were both policymakers and bureaucrats; the target comprised an internationally displaced population; and the mechanisms entailed changes to the state’s status quo procedures and requirements to facilitate obtaining legal status and rights. Across the four cases, the main mechanisms behind Colombia’s paper bridges were government learning, innovation, and adaptation, which created pathways to accessing status and rights for a sizable population. In large-scale international displacement contexts, receiving states should evaluate current post-arrival bureaucratic procedures and identify how to bridge existent paperwork gaps. Conclusion This paper has introduced the concepts of paperwork gaps and paper bridges. We sought to understand the interplay between bureaucratic requirements of a residence country and the documentation internationally displaced people can feasibly provide – given the capacities and willingness of their origin state on the one hand, and the receiving state’s efforts to bridge such gaps on the other. The four cases of paperwork gaps and paper bridges show how bureaucrats and policymakers within the Colombian state softened the traditionally rigid procedures and requirements in its citizenship and immigration regimes to facilitate the incorporation of displaced Venezuelans. Unilateral bureaucratic flexibility, adaptation, and innovation heightened access to legal status, naturalization, and concomitant rights. Bearing in mind the limitations of Colombia’s reforms, we also highlighted the shortcomings of these solutions, such as the exclusion of all other nationalities and those Venezuelans who arrived irregularly outside established timeframes. They remain living in situations of liminal legality and precarious citizenship. Theoretically our findings build on the literature on government learning and immigration policy implementation gaps (Czaika & De Haas, 2013) more broadly, and contribute to our knowledge on the implementation of liberal immigration policies in the Global South and Latin America more specifically. Instead of a scenario where policy promises more migratory restrictions than it can deliver, we show how government learning and bureaucratic innovation can close implementation gaps when the political goal is the regularization and inclusion of internationally displaced populations. We further respond to calls of unpacking the black box of the state by analyzing the institutional actors and processes behind such reforms. In terms of practical implications, our intention is that conceptualizing paperwork gaps and paper bridges can help other receiving states evaluate their own bureaucratic requirements and target groups (e.g., newly internationally displaced people) to adapt procedures within their citizenship and immigration regimes. Our findings are especially Page 17 of 20