Besserer Rayas et al. Comparative Migration Studies (2024) 12:47 Immigration regimes are institutionalized systems of formal and informal norms that define the policies, procedures, and eligibility of legal statuses and rights for foreigners, i.e., non-nationals (Boucher & Gest, 2015; Acosta & Harris, 2022). Critical for the present analysis, Latin American migration policy regimes define access to temporary and permanent residence, rights while in the territory, and nationality (Acosta & Harris, 2022). Since the last determines how nationality is granted (e.g., at birth versus naturalization, which is adopting the nationality), citizenship regimes overlap with immigration regimes. Some immigrants will naturalize and gain full membership in a polity; naturalization is the theoretical culmination of one’s integration journey. Citizenship and migratory statuses are hierarchical. Each category comes with a certain bundle of rights. Complete exclusion (no authorization for residence and no membership to a state) is the farthest conceptual opposite of complete inclusion (nationality by birth, being born into full rights). The continuum between involves various categories of people, making inclusion and rights a matter of degree. Even within citizenship, hierarchies persist, with native-born nationals enjoying more rights than naturalized persons (Pedroza & Palop-García, 2017). The literature on migration governance and the sociology of immigration have established links between the bureaucracy of residence countries and the outsized role of paperwork in structuring immigrant experiences and incorporation. As outlined here, the focus of most research has, thus far, concentrated on how lacking paperwork in residence countries increases exclusion and a host of negative outcomes for immigrants. People without regular migratory status live with high levels of uncertainty. Lacking a status could be because they are awaiting an application decision, stateless, undocumented, or have expired documents, for example. Similar instability exists also for those with temporary statuses and uncertain legal statuses that combine aspects of being both documented and undocumented, which Menjívar (2006) calls liminal legality. Del Real (2022) applies the concept to Venezuelans in Colombia, highlighting that the temporariness of their protection status is only superficially inclusive because its renewal depends on executive discretion and lacks a clear pathway to permanent residence or nationality (although the new 2021 status indeed outlines a path to residence). Those with liminal legal status can be seen as living under the violence of uncertainty, which is, “systematic personal, social, and institutional instability that exacerbates inequality…” (Grace et al., 2018: 904). As states develop rules and procedures about who can apply for citizenship (nationality) and different migratory statuses, paperwork gaps can emerge due to a mismatch between the documents a residence state requires versus the documents that immigrants and refugees can feasibly obtain from the origin state. The paperwork that international migrants require to gain and maintain legal statuses are known as pre- and post-migration bureaucracy (Finn, 2019). Especially in contexts of displacement, the origin state may not be capable or willing to produce, apostille, or notarize documents such as birth or marriage certificates, passports, identification cards, and health histories. Whereas states make and enforce these rules, immigrants live the consequences. Those unable to produce the right documents at the right time are trapped in the paperwork gap, which results in living undocumented or risking statelessness, two of the four subtypes that Lori (2017, p.745) classifies as precarious citizenship.1 1 The other two being temporary humanitarian status and temporary guest worker status. Page 4 of 20