ized policies for at-risk populations. Transparency laws dictated the form of these FOI requests.12 This process provided significant information for the study. Specifically, it exposed a wide range of obstacles and gaps in the gaining access to government-held information, particularly in Colombia and Brazil. The barriers included faulty webbased systems, requests needlessly rerouted to entities other than the ones petitioned, and poor quality irrelevance of the information provided. This required follow-up communications and repeated requests. While this study is intended to contribute to the growing body of assessments of countries’ citizenship laws and practices, it is just one step in that process. It is hoped that the research methodology employed for this study can be useful to other researchers conducting further examinations of the gap between citizenship rhetoric and practice. BORN IN THE AMERICAS 13