Besserer Rayas et al. Comparative Migration Studies (2024) 12:47 Page 6 of 20 Table 1 Conceptualizing the paperwork gap Elements of origin state documentary capacities Diminished due to governance crisis State weakness Diminished due to financial collapse Mobility emerges Economic crisis Interrupted, lacking, or weak consular services in residence country Paperwork gap Gap increases (opening) Gap remains Displacement (forced migration) Residence state Gap availability/ pres- decreases ence abroad (narrowing) Elements of residence state documentary requirements Becomes stricter, e.g., Exclusionary reacting to unwanted state immigration Strict and unchanging Insensitive/ toward immigration stubborn state Becomes more flexible Inclusionary and adaptable toward state that immigration narrows gap (e.g., Colombia 2015–2022) Given Colombia is a new receiving state of large-scale international displacement, it provides a rich site to study how officials learn to adapt and implement policies to build paper bridges. Only after a state recognizes the mismatch of formal versus feasible required documents can it then react by changing regulations and implementation. Such changes can occur through adaptation, that is adjusting existing policies and practice, or through innovation, that is introducing new laws or practices (see Finn & Besserer Rayas, 2022). While being far from faultless, nor necessarily providing legal status for all immigrants and refugees, paper bridges significantly narrow the paperwork gaps and increase naturalization and regularization rates. Background and data Brief context Since 2015, over 7.7 million Venezuelans have left Venezuela due to the country’s political, economic, and humanitarian crises (R4V, 2024). Between 2015 and 2022, Colombia received the highest number of people leaving Venezuela, numbering over 2.9 million (R4V, 2024). The influx – equivalent to 5% of the Colombian population – was very sudden, given that their net international migration had previously not exceeded 38,000 per year between 2000 and 2015 (Mejía Ochoa, 2020). In the context of Venezuela’s multiple crises, accessing documents became increasingly costly, inconsistent, and implied increased wait times, forcing many to leave without documents (see, e.g., Freier & DoñaReveco, 2022). For instance, as the Venezuelan government ran out of paper for passports, wait times extended from several months to over a year to obtain a passport, with elevated official costs of over 200 USD and an additional 120 dollars if obtained at a consulate (while the minimum monthly wage dropped to 10 USD); in practice, Venezuelans paid even more, with reports of passports totaling 800 dollars, which included costly bribes to corrupt informal middlemen (Becerra et al., 2022; Bolívar, 2021; Penagos et al., 2024). The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (2019) “expressed concern” over the difficulty for Venezuelan nationals to obtain paperwork as early as 2019. In parallel, Venezuela and Colombia interrupted their diplomatic and consular relations between 2019 and 2023, which further depleted Venezuelan documentary capacity in Colombia, exacerbating paperwork gaps for internationally displaced Venezuelans. Importantly, Venezuela had served as a main residence country for Colombians throughout the 20th century and for the first years of the 21st century, given Colombia’s prolonged civil conflict and economic instability (Bernal Márquez et al., 2020). This