Governance Through Uncertainty and the Making of Mixed-Status Venezuelan Families in Chile and Colombia

Abstract

Since the introduction of the term “mixed-status families” by Fix and Zimmermann in 2001, a growing body of literature has examined how migration and citizenship politics affect people as family units rather than individuals. While most of this literature has focused on contexts in the Global North, and on the effect of nationality acquisition rules, this paper explores the emergence of mixed-status Venezuelan families in South America, as the result of the precarisation of protection frameworks in the region and, more broadly, of what Biehl has called “governance through uncertainty”. Using 60 life-history interviews with Venezuelan migrants in Chile and Colombia, alongside 16 semi-structured interviews with civil society representatives, it argues that, unlike the formal stratification systems explored thus far, this phenomenon occurs through a combination of gender-blind migration policies and piecemeal regulations that afford family members different rights depending on the documents they possess, the timing of their departure, and, sometimes, sheer luck. By comparing the contexts of Colombia and Chile, the paper also underscores that the impacts of mixed migration statuses need to be analysed at the interplay between economic and legal precarity, and will vary substantially according to each country's labour market conditions and broader institutional context.

Introduction

Since the introduction of the term “mixed-status families” by Fix and Zimmermann (2001), a growing body of literature has emerged exploring how people experience contemporary migration and citizenship politics not as individuals but as part of family units (Bonjour and de Hart 2020). The increasing number of families residing in the Global North where each member holds a different migration status can be attributed to various factors. These include the combination of birthright citizenship with limited avenues for regularisation and naturalisation and the complexification of family migration and reunification policies (Fix and Zimmermann 2001; Bonjour and de Hart 2013). Most importantly, this literature has shown that migration status diversity has a series of detrimental consequences to familial relations, including restricted access to social protection policies for migrants and their citizen family members (Abrego 2019; Hart and Besselsen 2021), the reconfiguration of intimacy dynamics (Abrego 2019; Turner and Espinoza 2021), and the potential separation of family members due to the deportation of those with irregular statuses (Fix and Zimmermann 2001; Griffiths 2021).

To date, the existing studies on this topic have focused on the European and US contexts, primarily examining the role of citizenship and family migration policies in the emergence of mixed-status families. This paper argues the erosion of refugee protection frameworks and the multiplication of new and more precarious forms of temporary protection - together amounting to what Biehl (2015a, 2015b) has called “governance through uncertainty” - can similarly result in migration status diversity among forcibly displaced families. This phenomenon occurs through a combination of gender-blind migration policies and piecemeal regulations that afford family members different rights depending on the documents they possess, the timing of their departure, and, sometimes, sheer luck.

Research has shown that not every family member has the same capabilities of moving in contexts of political and economic demise. Contrary to common sense, the most vulnerable are often unable to flee due to a lack of social connections, knowledge, financial means, and bodily resources, often becoming trapped and “involuntarily immobilised” (Czaika and de Haas 2012). In such contexts, families often will not be able to migrate all at once, with those who are able-bodied, free from hands-on care responsibilities, and who have accrued social resources through previous mobility patterns usually being the first to move (Lubkemann 2008; Dubow and Kuschminder 2021). The work of Pessar and Mahler (2003) and their concept of “gendered geographies of power” have been particularly important in recognising that people's possibilities to migrate through regular and safe pathways are highly contingent on power hierarchies. The authors contended that factors such as gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality shape one's abilities to move, the migration pathways available for moving and, in tandem, the rights they are able to access in settlement countries.

In the present paper, I argue that in contexts in which protection and migration policies change quickly and in unpredictably ways, members of the same family who flee at different times often become subject to different and increasingly strict rules. In addition, as the conditions in their home countries deteriorate, those who flee later may find it more difficult to obtain the documents necessary to access certain protection pathways. To date, there has been limited in-depth analysis of the ways in which piecemeal policies and, more broadly, migration regimes that have uncertainty at their core end up indirectly codifying imbalances in people's capabilities of moving and generating mixed-status families upon settlement.

Building upon the idea that refugee protection is becoming ever-more precarious (Brun 2015; El-Shaarawi 2015; Mountz 2020a; Zapata and Tapia Wenderoth 2022; Zapata et al. 2023; Basok and Candiz 2025), and, more broadly, that migration regimes have been operating more and more through uncertainty (Biehl 2015a, 2015b), this study documents the emergence of mixed-status Venezuelan families in South America, focusing on the drivers of the phenomenon and its consequences for forcibly displaced families.

Latin America currently has one of the most progressive regional protection frameworks (Jubilut et al., 2018). The Cartagena Declaration from 1984, created in the context of the massive displacement of Central Americans, was signed by fifteen states, and significantly expanded the range of recognised causes for seeking asylum, including generalised violence, foreign aggression, internal conflict, and massive violations of human rights. In the twenty-first century, this has been followed by several policy documents that proclaimed migration as a human right and that were expressed in terms of principles of non-criminalisation and of equal treatment of migrants in relation to the native-born (Acosta, 2018; Rosas Prieto and Zapata 2024). The region also has a distinctive approach to family migration policies. States typically adopt a broad definition of family, extending reunification rights not only to spouses and children but also to other categories of kin—particularly in the context of refugee protection (Acosta, 2018; Martuscelli 2020).

Nonetheless, the mass displacement of Venezuelans in a short period of time put the Latin American protection system to the test and from 2017 onwards, countries in the continent started to devise institutional responses to what became the largest forced migration flow ever witnessed in the region. Crucially, most of these responses did not involve granting Venezuelans refugee status, as would previously have been expected given the Cartagena Declaration (Gandini and Selee 2023). While countries such as Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay extended the Mercosur residence agreement to Venezuelan citizens, ¹ others, such as Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru adopted a series of bespoke permits ruled by ad hoc and rapidly changing policies (Acosta, Blouin and Freier 2019; Gandini, Rosas and Lozano Ascencio 2019; Freier and Luzes 2021). ² Scholars such as Freier and Luzes (2021) have named these permits “humanitarian visas”, while others, such as Gandini and Selee (2023) refer to them as “temporary status measures”.

In this paper, I refer to the bespoke permits adopted by South American countries as temporary protection permits. I use this term because it captures their time-bound and exceptional nature, while still acknowledging their protective intent. This terminology allows for a comparative and critical analysis of how such instruments contribute to a broader global trend toward the precarisation of protection, in which ad hoc and short-term solutions increasingly replace asylum (see Bailey et al. 2002; Marston 2003; Zapata et al. 2023).

Temporary protection, which gained prominence in the 1980s during the Kosovo crisis, is typically used in situations of mass displacement for people who may not qualify for refugee status under the 1951 Refugee Convention. They are generally granted prima facie, allowing for quicker access to legal stay without lengthy Refugee Status Determination procedures (Ilcan, Rygiel and Baban 2018). These mechanisms retain certain protective features, such as granting applicants a form of legal status, guaranteeing access to basic social services and work rights, and protecting people from deportation (Ilcan, Rygiel and Baban 2018). However, they remain significantly more precarious than refugee status: in many countries, they do not provide a pathway to permanent residence and offer more limited social and legal rights (Marston 2003; Bailey et al. 2002; Ziss 2025; Sandberg et al., 2025). In the case of Latin America, the speed and ad hoc nature of their rollout make them particularly susceptible to creating zones of institutional indeterminacy (Del Real 2022). Lastly they are governed by eligibility criteria that are unstable and subject to frequent change. In the case of Peru and Chile, for example, Freier and Luzes (2021) have observed that humanitarian visas that were initially framed as protection mechanisms have evolved so substantially those they now function mainly as mechanisms of border control.

Key to the present discussion is that in Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru most people have been required to apply for such permits as separate applicants, seeking de facto reunification. In this context, the progressive features of the region's formal reunification mechanisms have limited practical relevance.

By analysing 60 life-history interviews with Venezuelan migrants in Chile and Colombia and their transnational families and 16 semi-structured interviews conducted with civil society representatives, this paper examines how the emergence of temporary protection permits has not only closed off safe and legal entry routes to host states but also created and reinforced gender and generational power dynamics within families. More specifically, this paper argues that, in the cases analysed, mixed-status families have emerged through three distinct yet interconnected mechanisms. First, temporary protection permits often require documentation that is difficult to obtain, and family members leaving Venezuela may have uneven access to the necessary paperwork. Second, the rapidly shifting migration policies governing these mechanisms mean that family members who migrate later are frequently subject to more restrictive rules than those who migrated earlier. Finally, delays, inconsistencies, and administrative inefficiencies in the rollout of these permits have led to significant gaps in the timing and conditions under which different family members achieve regular status.

Through a comparison of the cases of Colombia and Chile, this paper further shows that the consequences of mixed immigration status can differ in South–South migration contexts, compared to the South–North settings that have dominated the literature. Specifically, these consequences tend to revolve more around unequal access to social and economic rights than around the threat of deportation. In addition, in countries in which effective access to rights can be quite distant from what is established by formal policies (Vera Espinoza 2015; Ryburn 2018; Martuscelli 2020; Vera Espinoza, Gandini and Zapata 2022; Zapata, Vera Espinoza and Gandini 2022), the consequences of mixed migration status need to be analysed at the interplay between economic and legal precarity, and will vary substantially according to each country's labour market conditions and broader institutional context.

This paper not only contributes to the literature on mixed-status families by expanding its geographical and conceptual scope, but also to debates on governance through uncertainty. While existing research has largely explored uncertainty at the level of individual migrant experiences, this study shows how it differentially structures rights and mobility among kin, reinforcing, balancing, or producing new family hierarchies.

The Precarisation of Protection

Whilst mobility processes are always filled with unknowns, scholars have noted that migration regimes have become less and less intelligible and more unsteady in recent years (Biehl 2015a; Mountz 2020b). Not only have a proliferation of policies been introduced which appear to have been designed to physically deter movement, but states have been drawing on a number of techniques of manipulation of aspirations (Brun 2015; El-Shaarawi 2015; Biehl 2015a) that have the effect of forcing people to live in states of chronic limbo (Fleay and Hoffman 2014; Espinoza 2018; Nassar and Stel 2019; Mountz 2020a). Biehl (2015a, 2015b) has called this particular mode of governance - which does not necessarily operate via deterrence, but through dismay and despair (Fleay and Hoffman 2014) - “governance through uncertainty”. As Geddes (2021) argues, the concept of governance helps to capture the diffuse, multi-actor, and often opaque nature of contemporary migration control, where authority is exercised not solely through direct state intervention but through a dispersed assemblage of policies, practices, and narratives that shape migrants’ possibilities for movement and settlement. Seen through this lens, “governance through uncertainty” underscores how the production and management of instability itself becomes a governing technique.

Scholars investigating different technologies of governance that have uncertainty at their core have analysed the anxiety endured by detainees who do not know when deportation will take place or where they will be sent - a similar process experienced by asylum seekers who are unaware of when their claims will be judged, or if they will be resettled to, and if so, where to (Griffiths 2013; Biehl 2015a; Espinoza 2018; Candiz and Basok 2024). Other researchers have examined how this type of governance materialises in doubts about whether someone is seen or not seen by the state, whether their process has been lost in public bureaucracies, and whether their actions are being watched (Whyte 2011; Humphris 2019). Studies have also looked at the lived experiences of uncertainty unleashed by various forms of institutional ambiguity (Humphris 2019; Nassar and Stel 2019; Del Real 2022).

Particularly important to the present discussion are studies that document how the multiplicity of migration statuses and processes of policy layering have been contributing to the emergence of systems of migration governance that are constantly becoming more complex, expensive, transient, and obscure (Meissner 2018; Robertson 2019; Zapata et al. 2023). Here, I focus on one specific manifestation of this trend, which is the emergence of temporary protection permits. Created as a response to contexts of massive displacement, studies have shown that these new permits and visas are actually replacing asylum and creating a new class of refugees who must live through extended periods of limbo (Bailey et al. 2002; Marston 2003; Freier and Luzes 2021; Zapata et al. 2023). Most prior studies have highlighted the fact that the rights of residence allowed under humanitarian protection are provisional, and that time spent on these routes does not lead to permanent residence. By being required to return once settlement states deem that the situation in the home country is “safe”, receiving this type of permit places people in a state of permanent temporariness (Bailey et al. 2002; Simmelink 2011). It is particularly useful to call this policy “precarious protection” (see Marston 2003) because, as the etymological route of the word denotes, the faculty to enter and reside in a country in this case is not seen as a right, but as something given by mercy which is therefore inherently revocable.

In Chile, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, temporary protection permits lead to permanent residence, which is a key distinguishing feature in relation to other contexts. Yet, as previously outlined, they are largely ruled by ad hoc instruments (Acosta, Blouin and Freier 2019; Freier and Luzes 2021; Del Real 2022; Gandini and Selee 2023); they are based on more stringent documentation criteria than asylum, such as criminal record certificates and passports, which often do not account for the particularities of forced displacement (Freitez 2011); and having been created by piecemeal policies, they are particularly prone to creating areas of institutional indeterminacy (Del Real 2022; Zapata and Tapia Wenderoth 2022). In addition, the pathways from temporary residence under these permits to indefinite residence rights are often unclear and far from straightforward (Del Real 2022).

Material and Methods

This paper is based on a multiple-case study of Venezuelan migrants living in Chile and Colombia, as well as their transnational families dispersed across South America. The study was conducted from January to June 2022. Currently, Colombia and Chile represent the first and fifth most popular destinations for Venezuelan nationals, respectively. The fieldwork took place in the capital cities of the two countries, Bogotá, and Santiago, as well as in two border areas: Cúcuta, located on the border between Colombia and Venezuela, and Antofagasta, near the border between Chile and Peru.

The decision to focus on Colombia and Chile is based on their contrasting migration histories and policy contexts. Until 2015, Colombia had limited experience with immigration, functioning primarily as a country of emigration (Ciurlo 2015). Chile, by contrast, has been a key destination for intra-regional migrants since the 1990s (Doña-Reveco & Mullan, 2014). Both countries have adopted temporary protection measures in response to Venezuelan displacement, offering a useful comparison for understanding how such policies affect families in different socio-legal settings.

Three key differences between the two contexts stand out. First, Colombia's response to Venezuelan displacement has been comparatively more progressive, with efforts toward mass regularisation (Acosta, Blouin and Freier 2019). In contrast, Chile's humanitarian policies have often served to restrict entry, leaving thousands of Venezuelans in legal limbo with little prospect of regularisation, as will be further discussed (Freier and Luzes 2021). Second, the countries differ in how they integrate irregular migrants into their social protection systems. While Chile formally recognises irregular migrants’ right to healthcare, access in Colombia is extremely limited and generally restricted to emergency situations (Vera Espinoza et al. 2021). Third, the relationship between regularisation and formal employment diverges. In Colombia, high levels of informality mean job insecurity is widespread, regardless of visa status—even among dual Colombian–Venezuelan nationals (Bolívar, Almarza and Rodríguez 2022; DANE, 2023; Rosas Prieto and Zapata 2024). In Chile, lower levels of informality can make legal status more directly tied to labour market outcomes (Rosas Prieto and Zapata 2024). As will be discussed, these contrasting socio-legal contexts offer valuable insight into the consequences of mixed immigration statuses to families’ everyday life.

The study was part of larger research project focused on understanding the impact of uncertainty on transnational family dynamics and the sample was not purposively built according to families’ immigration status composition.

In total, the study included 60 life-story interviews conducted with Venezuelan migrants and non-migrants. Of those, 32 interviews have been conducted with pairs of people from the same family – which I call “family dyads” - totalling 16 pairs, while 28 interviews were conducted with non-paired individuals. The present analysis includes both dyad and non-dyad interviews. Interviews started with migrants living in Chile (Santiago and Antofagasta) and Colombia (Bogotá and Cúcuta), who were then asked to contact a close family member. Based on the initial interview, I asked to contact people who were “key” in participants’ stories, usually due to ongoing negotiations around migration and care. In all cases, family dyads lived separately or migrated at different times. The purpose of dyad interviews was to contrast the migration experiences of people within the same family.

The recruitment strategy followed a snowball sampling approach. Although participants were not selected purposively according to their class positions, I began by reaching out to a range of initial contacts that could help ensure socioeconomic diversity among the first participants. These included people recommended by NGOs, local churches, and professional networks I accessed through friends and colleagues. After that, participants themselves directed me to people they knew.

I adopted a reflexive approach to the interviews, focusing on how stories were produced rather than just their content. As a migrant myself—though not from Venezuela, Chile, or Colombia—I was often perceived as an outsider, a positionality that shaped the interview dynamics in important ways. On the one hand, it allowed me to avoid politically sensitive questions and, at times, encouraged participants to explain aspects of life in Venezuela they might not have shared with a fellow national. On the other hand, participants often contrasted my privileged mobility with their own experiences of displacement, precarity, and irregularity.

In total, I conducted 25 interviews with people living in Chile, 29 in Colombia, two in the USA, and four in Venezuela. Factors such as poor internet connection and participants’ loss of contact with family members represented obstacles to the conduction of interviews with participants in Venezuela. The choice of relevant dyad was left open and could also include people who, despite being considered family, were not necessarily connected to the participants by blood or marriage. However, in practice, most dyads comprised adult children and their mothers (six pairs), and partners (seven pairs). In addition, there was one pair of cousins and one pair of siblings among the dyads.

About 22 interviews were conducted with men, 37 with women and one interview was conducted with a non-binary person. The gender imbalance resulted partly from the difficulty of reaching out to men through their families who had already been interviewed. The consequences of this imbalance to the analysis are discussed in detail in the discussion section. Participants were aged between 18 and 67 years old.

Time of arrival was one of the key criteria used to structure the sample. Among participants, 20% arrived in 2017 or earlier, 20% in 2018, 20% in 2019, 14% in 2020, and 26% in 2021 or later. Purposively selecting people according to the year of arrival was intended to capture the diversity of experiences shaped by shifting policy contexts in destination countries and in Venezuela.

Additionally, 16 semi-structured interviews were conducted with civil society representatives, including people working in NGOs focused on migrants and refugees, and those working in migrant-led organisations. A total of 14 organisations were represented, with two staff members interviewed in two cases. Interviewees included directors, and in some instances, lawyers and social workers. Although not the primary focus of the study, these interviews provided valuable context for understanding the research sites and the broader political landscape in each setting.

South American Responses to the Venezuelan Displacement

The Venezuelan displacement is the world's second-largest displacement recorded to date. As of December 2024, it was estimated that there were over 7.9 million Venezuelan migrants worldwide (R4 V 2025). Most people have left the country since the start of the humanitarian crisis in 2017, fleeing from a scenario of acute food insecurity, hyperinflation, lack of basic public infrastructure, political persecution, and generalised urban violence (Freitez 2011; Freitez, Lauriño and Delgado 2020). By the end of 2024, it was estimated that 86% of Venezuelans were settled intra-regionally (R4 V 2025). Despite a long tradition of protection of forced migrants and the notable expansion of the range of recognised causes for seeking asylum through the Cartagena Declaration (circa 1984), few Venezuelans have been granted asylum in the region (Gandini and Selee 2023).

Colombia is an example of how a migratory framework designed in a context of high emigration had to be quickly adjusted to a massive and continuous immigration flow. In 2005, foreign-born nationals accounted for 0.26% of the total population living within Colombian borders, whilst an estimated 9% of all Colombians were living in other countries (Ciurlo 2015). At the beginning of 2020, Venezuelan nationals already represented 3.4% of the population of Colombia, not to mention Colombian returnees from Venezuela and second-generation Colombians born in Venezuela (Migración Colombia 2020a). Due to the emergence of the humanitarian crisis and following the rhetoric that the country owed a historic debt towards a neighbouring land which hosted thousands of Colombian migrants and refugees over the years, a new temporary protection mechanism targeting Venezuelan nationals was put in place in 2017.

The PEP (Especial Permanence Permit) was effective for a two-year period and allowed migrants to work, study, and access social security. However, it was not issued continuously; rather, it resembled an amnesty, although it did not lead to permanent residence. Between 2017 and 2021, Colombia implemented six rounds of PEP, each tailored to people who had entered the country within a particular timeframe and often with differing eligibility criteria. For example, the 2018 PEP-RAMV allowed people to apply for legal status without a passport, whereas subsequent rounds required applicants to present a passport with an official entry stamp.

An obvious difficulty emerging from this system relates to cases of people who did not have a Venezuelan passport, or who have not entered the country through a regular post. The obstacles to issuing a passport in Venezuela today are manifold, including long waiting times, abusive fees, and problems in the electronic registration process (Freitez, Lauriño and Delgado 2020). The result is that, despite this seemingly liberal policy, the number of irregular Venezuelan migrants in the country was still striking and it is estimated that 56% of Venezuelans living in Colombia were irregular by 2020 (Migración Colombia 2020b).

In an effort to curb irregularity, Colombia announced in 2021 a new temporary protection permit giving Venezuelans the right to reside and work in the country for up to ten years, called PPT (Permit of Temporal Protection). The policy included anyone – regardless of the mode of entry – who had arrived by 2021, and also those who entered through a regular post in the next two years. Internationally praised as an inclusive policy and humanitarian solution, there was a key mismatch between the policy on paper and the country's implementation capabilities. The waiting times for the issuing of the PPT have been extremely long and unforeseeable, spanning months or a few years, which has perpetuated the state of legal limbo in which most people had already been placed for arriving in the interstices of regularisation rounds (Bitácora Migratoria, 2022). By March 2022, when this research was conducted, it was estimated that over half of Venezuelan migrants in Colombia were still waiting for their permits to be processed (DANE 2022). As of June 2024, 7% of Venezuelans living in Colombia were waiting for the processing of their residence permit; overall, 28% of the population had an irregular immigration status (DANE 2024). Colombia does not publish official asylum grant rates. However, it is well documented that asylum procedures are slow and protracted. Of the 7,900 claims processed in 2024, 70% had been filed between 2017 and 2022 (Cancillería, 2025). While waiting for a decision, asylum seekers in Colombia are not legally permitted to work—prompting many to apply for temporary protection permits instead (Anonymous, 2023).

Chile is also a signatory to most international and regional conventions on the rights of refugees. However, asylum acceptance rates have been incredibly low and, between 2010 and 2023, only 0.3% of asylum claims of Venezuelan nationals have been successful (Hilliger and Castillo 2024) As a result, most people chose other migration pathways. Until June 2019, Venezuelan nationals could enter the country as tourists as long as they carried a passport and then switch to a work visa. However, following a rise in immigration levels since 2017, Chile adopted a new policy in June 2019 whereby it denied the entrance of Venezuelan migrants who did not have a tourist visa or a consular protection visa. The Visa of Democratic Responsibility, as it was called, had to be expedited in Venezuela or in a Chilean consulate via an onerous and bureaucratic procedure, which, again, required the presentation of passports (Acosta, Blouin and Freier 2019; Gandini, Rosas and Lozano Ascencio 2019).

Following the start of the pandemic, more specifically from March 2020, more uncertainty was added to the process. As the Chilean borders closed, humanitarian visa applications were put on hold for eight months, and, upon the reopening of consulates in November, all on-going applications were cancelled. A new process started from then, in which only 30 visas were processed a day. ³ As a result of the narrow eligibility criteria, the unpredictability of results, and the long processing times, the permit soon fell into disuse. Currently, it is no longer possible to apply for the VRD, although there has been no formal announcement on its closure, which speaks volumes to the idea of uncertainty outlined in the previous section. As of February 2022, the VRD had received around 489,000 applications, but only 33,000 of them were approved (7% of the total). 80% of the applications were denied and 13% were being processed. ⁴

In sum, the Colombian PPT is far more encompassing, functioning as a regularisation mechanism accessible to the majority of the Venezuelan population. The VRD, in contrast, is markedly exclusionary; most regularised Venezuelans in Chile today hold other types of residence permits, typically work visas obtained prior to 2018. And yet both permits—the VRD in Chile and the PPT in Colombia—are highly precarious, with shifting and often opaque eligibility criteria, and offer no direct pathways to permanent residence. In the Colombian case, Del Real (2022) refers to this situation as one of “inclusionary liminal legality,” wherein regularisation is widespread, yet the mechanisms leading to more stable immigration status remain unclear.

Key to the present discussion is that the effects of irregular immigration status—and its impact on mixed-status families—differ markedly between Chile and Colombia due to their distinct institutional contexts and the rights granted to irregular migrants. In Chile, irregular migrants can access public services like healthcare and education through a provisional ID (RUT provisorio) ⁵ (Vera Espinoza et al. 2021; Prieto Rosas Prieto and Zapata 2024), but stricter enforcement and higher regularity rates mean legal status often leads to better job opportunities. In contrast, in Colombia, widespread labour informality means that regularisation does not significantly improve employment conditions, though it remains crucial for accessing subsidised healthcare and, at times, education. These contextual differences frame the analysis that follows, which explores how legal status shapes the daily lives and inequalities experienced by Venezuelan migrant families. Given the rapidly changing nature of immigration policies in both countries, it is important to note that the findings reflect the institutional landscape as of early 2022.

The Precarisation of Protection as a Driver for the Emergence of Mixed-Status Families

The effects of the erosion of refugee protection frameworks in the region varied substantially among family members. In Chile, eight (8) of the twenty-two (22) interviewees/dyads that took part in the research lived with a family member whose status differed from theirs; in Colombia, nine (9) out of twenty (20) families I interviewed had mixed statuses. ⁶ Across the interviews, it became clear that the use of temporary protection statuses, and more broadly, the precarisation of protection had contributed to the emergence of migration status diversity via three main mechanisms, which will be analysed in detail in this section: family members’ variable access to documents before leaving Venezuela; unclear visa processing times in Chile and Colombia; and migration policy changes in both countries.

Variable Access to Documents

Among the couples I met, it was common for only one of the partners to hold a Venezuelan passport. This usually happened because one family member had already been issued with the document before the Venezuelan crisis reached its peak, while the other had tried to obtain theirs from 2016 onwards. The processing of travel documents in Venezuela has become progressively costly and time-consuming over the years (Broner, Frelick and Albin-Lackey 2018). As of July 2025, Venezuelan passports officially cost 18.000 VES (around 150 USD). However, participants noted that since 2016, Venezuelan passports can cost from 200 USD to 500 USD including under the table prices and can take over a year to be processed. The current costs are prohibitive for most of the population, who have been severely hit by poverty and hyperinflation.

In all the cases I encountered, the men had a passport, while their wives only had a national ID or no documents at all. This was generally attributed to men's tendency to be more mobile in the years preceding the country's political and economic demise. This was exemplified by the account of Antonio, 41, a former police officer, and his wife, Yesica, 35, who was a social worker in Venezuela:

For example, I already had my passport, but at the time my wife went to receive hers, everything was blocked. Since I have been a police officer from a very young age … having a passport is required for all in the police force. But my wife was not aware, she was in her normal job… and when everything happened, it was already tough.

Moreover, in cases where families could only afford to obtain a single document, preference was often given to the man. This logic was exemplified by Alejandro, 22, who was living in Bogotá with his wife and child. Although neither had a passport at the time of our interview, Alejandro planned to prioritise regularising his own status first, explaining:

I’m the one trying to get everything sorted out for myself so that I can then prioritise hers. Because how can I put it? My idea is, ‘You take care of the baby, I’m going to do everything I can to be legal and have more opportunities, and when I do, well, I’ll take care of the girl, and you get all your papers and all that.’

His reasoning reflects a gendered migration strategy in which men's legal status is seen as the gateway to the family's economic stability, while women's documentation—and with it, access to rights and more autonomy—is postponed in favour of their role as caregivers.

While undocumented family members would try to secure their passports and criminal records certificate through SAIME's – Venezuela's Administrative Identification Service – and were helpless in the face of their erratic processing mechanisms, holding a passport has become a prerequisite for obtaining protection permits and migrant visas in most South American countries (with the exception of the PPT in Colombia since 2020). As a consequence, family members who entered destination countries with different types of credentials had access to different rights. Although no statistical data on regularisation by sex or gender exist, among the people I met men's greater propensity to be mobile put them in a better position to access regularisation. This trend links with previous research showing how pre-displacement mobility patterns have allowed men and women different opportunities to move in times of crisis (Lubkemann 2008).

Remarkably, children who did not have the right documentation could also remain irregular regardless of their parents’ statuses. In Chile, despite a policy that guarantees regularisation for children irrespective of their mode of entry, the eligibility criteria still present practical challenges for migrant families. While Chile requires migrant children to have a photo ID from their country of origin to access the benefit, Venezuela only issues such a document to children above the age of nine. Those who reach this age must then undergo a paid request process at the consulate, which is both time-consuming and expensive. Elizabeth, 37, a resident of an informal settlement in Antofagasta, provided insight into why she and her children had different immigration statuses from her husband, who had arrived in Chile one year earlier:

My husband arrived… in 2018. He came legally, stamping his passport as a tourist. But we [Elizabeth and her children] don’t have passports… I applied for the passports in Venezuela, but they never arrived. And, well, it was time to migrate. […] None of us has a passport, and we don’t even have ID right now because we lost them on the journey. The two small children must get their Venezuelan IDs now for the first time, but I have not been able to get them. I have to go to Santiago to do the paperwork.

Like many of the people I spoke with in Antofagasta, Elizabeth could not complete any of the steps required by Chilean legislation. Along with the official and unofficial expenses that most Venezuelan procedures carry, the absence of consular representation in Antofagasta meant that she would have to undertake a 19-h bus journey to Santiago to handle the necessary paperwork. Migrants in Colombia faced a similar situation due to the rupture in diplomatic relations between the two nations. However, in this case, they were required to return to Venezuela - ironically, the country from which they were fleeing - if they had any outstanding bureaucratic issues to resolve. Importantly, going to Venezuela or Santiago, in the case of Chile, meant not only finding the money for the bus journey, but also spending time away from work and income-generating activities.

Policy Changes

The second mechanism through which the uncertainty of both countries’ protection regimes led to migration status diversity within families has been policy changes, and in particular, the ways in which they intersect with each family member's departure time. This was particularly common in Chile. Until 2019, many people entered Chile as tourists, carrying only a passport. Many hoped to reunite with their families at a later stage. They did not count, however, with the possibility that policies would change so abruptly. The adoption of the consular visa (Visa de Responsabilidad Democratica - VRD) without sufficient notice in June 2019 left many families who aspired to come together stranded for unpredictable periods of time. As a result, many people ultimately decided to pursue de facto reunification through irregular pathways.

This was the case of Laura, 36, and her 60-year-old mother, Lina. Laura had migrated to Chile in 2016 and was already a permanent resident. During an interview she asked me not to record, Lina told me how she and her 64-year-old husband Jorge (Laura's father) did not initially want to leave Venezuela but were forced to do so by the end of 2021 in view of the country's quickly deteriorating living conditions and mounting inflation. By that time, however, the only possibility of entering Chile regularly was by applying to a VRD, and there were rumours that the visa was either taking an excessive amount of time to process or not being issued at all, although Chile had not made any formal announcements on the matter. Since Laura knew a trustworthy smuggler, they decided that it was better to bring the couple irregularly through the Peruvian border, than waiting for a long and uncertain visa process. Despite Laura being a permanent Chilean resident, her parents were now irregular. Given their entry mode, they had dim prospects of ever having their papers sorted out, regardless of their daughter's status.

In Colombia, the practice of issuing protection visas in rounds and using different criteria in each round has also resulted in families who arrived at different times or through different countries being assigned different rights. The story of Carla and Diego, both aged 30, whom I interviewed in Bogotá, shows how policy changes in both Chile and Colombia casted Diego – but not Carla - into irregularity. Carla migrated to Chile first. She arrived in Santiago in May 2019, and Diego planned to join her in August of the same year: three months later, right after he finished his master's degree in Caracas. Carla was able to enter the country as a tourist, carrying only her passport, hoping to soon be able to get a job and apply for a working visa. Diego planned to do the same. However, two weeks after she arrived, Chile adopted a new decree requiring Venezuelans to apply for a consular temporary protection visa (the VRD) to enter the country. Diego was now stranded. Even though the VRD was supposed to facilitate and prioritise family reunification processes, he would have to wait seven months to hear back about his application for the visa submitted in June 2019. This is how Diego remembers the day Chile announced that he would now need a consular visa to enter the country and reunite with his wife:

Those were the worst news I could hear; the worst news I’ve ever received in my life. I spent three days drinking anything I could find. For about three days, I just stared at the ceiling, unable to do anything, feeling impotent. And now, this has become something popular throughout Latin America. Everywhere; it's no longer just in Chile. I mean, they were the pioneers of implementing those mandatory visas. They put that in place in June 2019, and in July 2019, Peru implemented the same visas for Venezuelans, and right after that, Ecuador did the same for Venezuelans.

Disheartened by the dim possibilities of going to Chile, the solution encountered by Carla and Diego to be together was to migrate to Colombia in November 2021, during the pandemic, one year and a half after they separated for the first time. By that time, Colombia had reopened its borders with most countries in the region, except for Venezuela. As a result, whilst Carla was able to enter the country regularly by plane, Diego was forced to cross the border irregularly by land. In their new destination, Carla could then automatically apply for a protection visa, whilst Diego would remain in limbo for another year, until he was able to apply for the PPT and receive his residence card. As he recalls:

When Carla arrived, since she arrived at an airport and everything, she was able to regularise her status, get her special residence permit, the PPT. But I couldn’t because I entered by land [irregularly] and I didn’t have my passport stamped. I wasn’t in any system, and I couldn’t regularise my status. So, from that point on, I started looking for different types of jobs. Anything I could get really.

The reasons why family members migrate at different times are manyfold. Some, as Laura and Lina, have different aspirations of moving at a given time. In fact, it was common to find older people who were reluctant to leave Venezuela, waiting until conditions worsened before making the decision to flee. In other cases, such as in the story of Carla and Diego, family members planned to reunite soon after completing a degree, finalising moving arrangements, or for other everyday reasons. Additionally, as illustrated by Elisabeth's experience, access to passports and travel documents varied among family members, causing delays as some awaited the issuance of their papers within Venezuela. What many families did not anticipate was the sudden and unexpected changes in entry policies in destination countries. In all these cases, what becomes clear is that the precarisation of protection – which, as argued, is marked precisely by the multiplication of piecemeal and ad hoc policies (Bailey et al. 2002; Marston 2003; Freier and Luzes 2021) - has not affected everyone in the same way. As policies became increasingly restrictive over the years, the burden fell more heavily on those family members who had to leave at a later stage.

Processing Times

An important aspect of the new protection regimes implemented in Latin America is that people awaiting the outcomes of their regularisation processes often found themselves without any migration status. Notably, the timelines for these applications were generally unpredictable. Many families I met had mixed statuses due to the different paces at which their visa applications had been, or were being, processed. In Chile, this was embodied in the puzzling percentages used by the online migration system to update participants on the status of their applications: family members who entered the system simultaneously had different progress reports. In the case of Colombia, where migrants could not keep track of their applications, disappointment would arise when family members who applied together were told to collect their documents at different times, sometimes months or even years apart. Claudia, a representative of a migrant-led organisation in Bogotá, clearly summarised this issue:

So, for example, the whole family went there and applied for these permits [PPT] on the same day. Then mine was issued, but my child's was not. Or one of my children had their permit issued, but not their sibling. Or one of the documents was sent to another city. Or mine came with an error because the official who was doing the registration at that time had no empathy. Because there's something here called ‘the discretion of the official’. In other words, as an official, I can do whatever I want.

María, 60, who lived in Bogotá with her daughter, grandchildren, and son in law shared her concerns about the unpredictable processing times of the protection permit, and how this has affected her family members differently:

We were told that the first to enrol seemed to have been those who have the problem that it [the PPT] is not being issued. Nobody knows if it's because it's been deleted from the system; nobody knows what really happened. Some people in my family haven’t received theirs yet. We are missing my daughter's and my granddaughter's. My daughter's husband already has it. His [document] arrived fast and he can work and everything.

Research has shown that migration regimes use ambiguity, ignorance, and discretionary power in closely interconnected ways (Biehl 2015b; Espinoza 2018; Humphris 2019). Since my research participants did not include street-level bureaucrats, the reasons why family members’ applications were processed and evaluated in such variable ways are unknown. However, migrants frequently referred to this phenomenon as a “migration lottery”, a term that captures the idea of a system that, through the combination of both formal and informal rules (see Nassar and Stel 2019), assigns them different rights apparently based on sheer luck.

Consequences of Mixed-Migration Status to Familial Relations

Among the families I interviewed in both Chile and Colombia, the most evident consequence of migration status diversity was unequal access to labour and social rights. It is worth noting that, in contrast to countries in the Global North (Fix and Zimmermann 2001; Abrego and Larossa 2009), this study's participants’ primary concern was not deportability or the prospect of facing further separation from their families. Deportations are uncommon in Colombia, and expulsion orders in Chile can usually be reversed in light of family ties. ⁷ Angel, the director of an NGO in Antofagasta, Chile, clearly underscores this point:

Several families have one member who is a permanent resident and others who entered through unauthorised pathways. In those cases, even if you have a direct relationship with a permanent resident, you cannot regularise your situation. The penalty for irregular entry into Chile is an administrative expulsion order [deportation], which can be appealed through an application for protection (recurso de amparo) in the high courts. Arguments such as having a relative with permanent resident status, children studying in Chile, a job, and sending remittances can lead to expulsion orders. Being overturned. Therefore, these people can no longer be expelled from Chile. However, they do not have a visa. In other words, they are in limbo. Because on the one hand, they can no longer be expelled from the country, but on the other, they are not given visas. They are sentenced to live in irregularity, and no one takes charge.

To understand the differing life experiences of mixed-status families in each context, it is essential to first examine how participants perceive the relationship between regularisation and access to formal employment.

In Chile, precarious migration statuses have clearly produced precarious employment relations. In contrast, in the case of Colombia, the impact of precarious migration statuses on people's everyday lives was more nuanced. Among the research participants, three people had lived in both countries. Below, Edson who had been regular in Colombia and was then irregular in Chile, talks about his experiences in both countries:

Well, unlike Colombia, if you manage to be regular in Chile, you have many more opportunities than in Colombia. Here, I feel that it's a real regularisation, that you do notice the benefits of having some kind of migratory regularisation. In Colombia, the president simply says, “Damn it, what do we do with these Venezuelans who came to the country? Do we give them a little letter, a piece of paper, what the hell do we do with them?” [laughs]

Many of the study participants in Colombia felt that very little had changed in their lives since they had become regular; that the PPT or any other document was just “a piece of paper”, as Edson put it. This perception was generally linked to the fact that most migrants in Colombia had ended up working in the de-regulated, low-wage economy.

The different links between regularisation and employment generated very different consequences for mixed-status families in both countries. For most of the women I met in Chile, unequal access to formal residence and, hence, formal work, had led to the emergence or reinforcement of gender hierarchies. This was the case for Elizabeth, who, as discussed in the previous section, arrived in Antofagasta without any documents, while her husband had a stamped passport and a work visa:

I feel like he is the one financing me. And I don’t want that. I want to work. I mean, he has known me as a working woman. Because when we met, I worked as a kitchen assistant, and then I started making empanadas to sell. And I like to work, I like it. But my fear is to work like this, without papers, because they fine the person who hires us. […] And that makes me feel… And my husband… He feels like the alpha male because he is, let's say, the one bringing food to the table. We fight and argue every single day.

In the gender regime Elizabeth was accustomed to before displacement; she worked alongside her husband, even if for a lower wage. However, the legal hierarchies encountered after displacement contributed to a shift towards less equal gender relations. Importantly, the privileged position that this imbalance afforded Elizabeth's husband was self-reinforcing: as he increasingly saw himself as the sole provider, he became more controlling and, in her words, more machista, limiting her ability to engage in (even irregular) paid work. Due to the limitations of this study in reaching more male participants, outlined in the methodology, I was not able to interview men with regular status whose partners was irregular, and therefore could not explore how the burden of being the sole provider working regularly may have affected them.

In addition, one adult family member having irregular status had spillover effects on the entire family – a trend that has already been documented by the literature on mixed-status families (Abrego and Larossa 2009; Bonjour and de Hart 2020). With just one wage-earner, families could not meet the cost of living in settlement countries, nor send remittances to Venezuela. Following the pandemic and her husband's dismissal from his job, Elizabeth told me how her irregular status became even more problematic. Her husband being the sole wage earner not only meant that he took most family decisions, but that they could not afford an adequate living for their children or for their families who had stayed in Venezuela. In fact, she was extremely worried about relying solely on his work:

He is 45 years old. He could get sick at any moment, or I could get sick. So, we must run the house between the two of us. Because whenever he can’t find work, we don’t have enough to eat. So, we both have to work; there is no other option. […] Previously, well, it's been a few years now, my husband had a stable job, and I could send money to my family. I helped my sisters because my husband was giving me money. Because I haven’t been able to work. But now, he works with freight, and our income has dropped, and I haven't been able to send anything.

In Colombia, people with an irregular status also remained in limbo until their protection permit was issued. Yet, according to the research participants, the economic impacts of having an irregular status were less pronounced there.

Participants in Colombia often reported that their diverse migration statuses had no major impact on how families balanced their financial responsibilities. Kelly, 21, for example, arrived in Bogotá without a passport and remained irregular until the issuance of her PPT in 2022; in contrast, her partner, who held the document, got a PEP as soon as he arrived. When I asked if that had had any impact on their relationship, she replied:

No, not so much, because he had more stability. So, it was better because at least we had a foundation. So, what I could do from my side was to complement what was missing. But the foundation was there. He could do the paperwork, documents… all these things that are very important here.

Although Kelly recognised the importance of her partner's regular status—describing it as providing a stable “foundation” that enabled him to handle essential tasks like paperwork and documentation—this did not exempt her from the need to contribute economically. The low value of wages in Colombia meant that, regardless of regular status, she still had to do paid work to contribute to the family's income. After asking if she felt dependent on her partner, she responded: “No, actually, no. Because we both worked. Obviously, one had more strength than the other in terms of economic power. But I knew I depended on my work, on what I did.”

This does not mean that migration status diversity has no impact on family life in Colombia. Unlike in Chile, where irregular migrants generally have access to public healthcare, this right is denied to those without a PPT in Colombia (Vera Espinoza et al. 2021). Leyda, 27, whom I met in Bogotá, was pregnant and living irregularly in the country for not carrying documents, while her husband had PPT obtained through his passport. Her 7-year-old daughter born in Venezuela was also irregular. She shared her experience of being denied healthcare:

My husband does have the EPS [health insurance]. But my daughter and I, until we have the PPT, aren’t accepted at the hospital. When I took my daughter to the hospital here, they wouldn’t see her. I’d have to pay for the consultation, and it cost us 165.000 [Colombian] pesos [40 USD]. When I was hospitalised in December, when I was already pregnant, they also treated me very poorly, as if they were doing me a favour: “This Venezuelan woman, how many children does she plan to have here?”

While education is considered a universal right, participants living in Colombia have also reported that children who had no protection permits faced more obstacles to enrol in school. In this respect, the consequences of status diversity were marked, with siblings having different educational opportunities and some family members having more reduced access to medical care than others. Carolina's experience of getting pregnant with her second child in Bogotá is a poignant example of this trend:

When I was pregnant with him [youngest child] they wouldn’t see me anywhere. To be able to see a doctor, I had to pay for a 100.000 [Colombian] pesos consultation [25 USD]. We only had two or three [antenatal] consultations. Of course, once he was born, he could be seen anywhere because he is Colombian. And my other son is Venezuelan. We came with him when he was one year old. And we couldn't take him to any hospital either. We have only been able to do so now, three years later, since his permit has arrived.

In Chile, where irregular migrants still have access to primary healthcare and education, participants reported that status diversity was practically a non-issue when the irregularised family member had no prospect of engaging in paid work, such as children and older persons. In fact, according to Isabel, an NGO representative in Antofagasta, it was not uncommon for families to believe that their children's provisional ID (RUT provisorio) is also a residence ID (RUT), leading them to spend months and even years in unrecognised irregularity:

Of course, because they [public officers] tell them [migrants], “This is your provisional ID to go to the doctor” or “This is your ID to enrol your child in school”. So, it often happens that people tell us, “Yes, my son has a visa”, and then we realise that no, that they only have a provisional ID to do one of these two procedures.

In summary, while the rise of temporary protection mechanisms has led to the emergence of mixed-status families in both Chile and Colombia, the practical consequences of this status diversity vary significantly between the two countries. These differences are shaped by their distinct economic and institutional contexts, including the rights afforded to irregular migrants. In Colombia, status diversity has more pronounced implications for access to social services such as healthcare and education. In contrast, in Chile—where legal status more directly enables access to formal employment and where healthcare and education are universally guaranteed—the disparities are more evident in terms of economic capacity. These contrasting dynamics also shape gender and generational hierarchies differently: in Colombia, imbalances tend to affect family members across age groups, while in Chile, they are more evident among adult couples. Ultimately, participants’ experiences reveal that the outcomes of migration status diversity are deeply contextual, shaped by the complex interplay between regularisation, labour markets and the social rights infrastructure available to irregular migrants.

Conclusion

In recent decades, extensive literature on mixed-status families has developed in Europe and the United States. These works have examined how inequalities in access to the rights resulting from family migration policies and nationality acquisition rules reinforce gender hierarchies and affect the intimacy of migrant families (Menjívar 2006; Mangual Figueroa, 2012; Bonjour and de Hart 2020; Turner and Espinoza 2021). In South America, mixed-status families can form for different reasons. This study has shown that the erosion of refugee protection frameworks, and more broadly, governance through uncertainty in the region creates a series of legal hierarchies among kin. The stringent documentation requirements that do not account for the forced character of this migration, the multiple policy changes, and the poorly implemented protection policies affect family members in radically different ways. Unlike most analysed cases in the Global North, there are no family migration/reunification rules operating in practice in this context, i.e., most family (re)unification is de facto and not de jure. Yet, in a context marked by processes of policy layering (Acosta, Blouin and Freier 2019), the combination of formal and informal rules (Del Real 2022) and a dearth of family reunification pathways, family members will be placed in different positions in the hierarchies of citizenship, depending on the documents they possess, the timing of their departure, and, often, sheer luck. In many cases, this ends up codifying people's different capabilities of moving – in other words, family members who have to leave at a later stage or who could not afford the issuance of certain documents, will be irregularised upon settlement.

Contrary to most cases in the Global North, participants’ primary concern was not deportability or imminent separation, but the inequalities in social and economic rights. This imbalanced situation, in which women seem to be the ones most often illegalised, leads to gendered regimes that are potentially more hegemonic than the ones people were used to back in Venezuela, with female migrants becoming restricted to unpaid care obligations. This was particularly common in Chile, where there is a stronger link between regularity and formal work. In addition to taking away women's autonomy, this circumstance also impairs the well-being of the entire transnational family. Having every family member working for a wage and swapping paid and non-paid responsibilities is one of the main strategies my interlocutors found to cope with the uncertainties of precarious work. However, it is important to emphasise that the ultimate impact of legal statuses on family relationships depends on how irregularity is de facto experienced in each place. This consideration is particularly important in contexts where regularisation does not guarantee easy access to formal employment and where the vast majority of migrants (regular and irregular) are placed in the flexible, de-regulated economy, such as the case of Colombia. There, it was access to public education and subsidised healthcare that created the most significant cleavages within families, affecting not only adults but also children, with consequences that spanned across generations.

Temporary protection mechanisms are not exclusive to Latin America; they have been implemented in various contexts, from Turkey to the United States. While existing scholarly research has examined how these modes of migration governance that have uncertainty at their core can place individuals in a state of chronic limbo, future studies should delve deeper into the impact of these policies on family dynamics, particularly in relation to migration status diversity and forced separation. Studies that look at South-South migration are particularly needed, especially as the impact of mixed status on family relationships can be different in contexts marked by acute economic precarity. To provide valuable insights for policymakers, future research in Latin America should also aim to quantify the number of families with mixed immigration statuses and gather evidence on the socio-demographic characteristics of those who are most frequently placed in irregularity. Future studies should also aim to look further into how the ultimate impact of legal statuses on family relationships depends on the intersection of multiple cleavages, including family members’ generational, class and racial positions.