Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Political Science

Advisor

John Mollenkopf

Committee Members

Robert Courtney Smith

Els de Graauw

Subject Categories

Comparative Politics | Migration Studies | Other Political Science

Keywords

Immigration, Colombia, Venezuela, regularization, undocumented, ethnography

Abstract

The question of how states interact with irregular or undocumented immigrants is a key issue of contemporary politics and the social sciences. A large proportion of studies focuses on traditional destination states which engage irregular immigrants through coercion and exclusionary measures. This study examines how states govern irregular migration through the extension of rights rather than coercion and exclusion and how these rights extension affect immigrant incorporation, their lives, and that of their families. This dissertation is a case study of what might be considered an “anomalous case” (Seawright and Gerring 2008) or a case of “positive deviance” (Cammett 2022). As Colombia rapidly became an immigrant destination country due to mass Venezuelan displacement, some of its highest officials decided to implement a 10-year work and residence permit with a pathway to citizenship, documenting 2.4 out of 2.8 million foreign-born in its territory. Additionally, Colombia maintained an exceptionally low level of deportation and border enforcement.

As Colombia implemented one of the world’s most expansive regularization programs, granting work and residence permits to Venezuelans and providing a pathway to citizenship, it maintained exceptionally low levels of deportation and border enforcement. This response defies dominant theories of migration governance, including the presumed trade-off between rights and numbers and expectations that liberalization is driven by business interests, electoral incentives, or left-wing governments, among others. Conceptually, the study advances the notion of the documenting state, arguing that large-scale regularization can function as a strategy of state-building by using rights-based governance to increase bureaucratic legibility and state capacity. Empirically, it combines elite interviews with policymakers, legal and documentary analysis, public records requests, ethnographic fieldwork, and in-depth interviews with Venezuelan migrants of varying legal status. This mixed qualitative approach bridges top-down analyses of policy design with bottom-up accounts of immigrant incorporation.

Chapter one introduces the concept of the documenting state, arguing that large-scale regularization of undocumented immigrants can function as a strategy of state-building. Through analysis of Colombia’s 2021 Estatuto, the chapter shows how documentation reshapes the relationship between immigrants and the state. Chapter two develops the concepts of paperwork gaps and documentation bridges to explain how the Colombian state adapted legal and bureaucratic requirements to expand access to legal status among Venezuelan migrants. It demonstrates that regularization was not a one-off policy but an ongoing state project. The chapter also illustrates how these concepts travel beyond Colombia. Chapter three examines the effects of documentation on immigrant incorporation by comparing documented and undocumented Venezuelans and centering the immigrant family as the unit of analysis. It finds that legal status constitutes a critical life-course juncture, improving access to employment, healthcare, and empowerment—even in Colombia’s low-deportation, high-informality context. Chapter four analyzes the interaction between documentation and informality in the labor market and in housing, arguing that informality can facilitate immigrant incorporation when migrants retain the option to exit it through legal status. Drawing on ethnographic evidence and Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty framework, the chapter distinguishes between compulsory and non-compulsory informality and shows how strategic non-enforcement operates as a form of migration governance. Chapter five studies the mass denationalization of 43,000 Venezuelan-Colombians as a counterfactual case, demonstrating that Colombia possessed the capacity for coercive exclusion but chose not to deploy it broadly. Through comparative analysis, including cases such as the UK’s Windrush scandal, the chapter shows how citizenship itself can be undermined through bureaucratic immigration enforcement, highlighting the fragility of even the most stable legal rights.

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