Venezuelan migrant Yulianis Rodriguez, hunches down in Maicao, Colombia's Hospital San Jose as she struggles to cope with the pain of labor without an epidural on May 5, 2019. She crossed into Colombia alone to give birth to her baby son who was born 'stateless' and is now among 24,000 children who were granted Colombian citizenship by the country's government. Image by Megan Janetsky. Colombia, 2019.
Venezuelan migrant Yulianis Rodriguez, hunches down in Maicao, Colombia's Hospital San Jose as she struggles to cope with the pain of labor without an epidural on May 5, 2019. She crossed into Colombia alone to give birth to her baby son who was born 'stateless' and is now among 24,000 children who were granted Colombian citizenship by the country's government. Image by Megan Janetsky. Colombia, 2019.

Thousands of migrants stream over the Venezuela-Colombia border every day, fleeing everything from political clashes to rampant hyperinflation. Many of those are pregnant women who lack basic health services and face food and medicine shortages in Venezuela. As the situation grows more desperate, they arrive in greater numbers in Colombia, a country that has taken on the brunt of the mass exodus from Venezuela. But when the women give birth in Colombia, due to the country's birthright citizenship laws, their children face another hurdle: statelessness.

Internationally, a stateless person is considered "a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law." Without an identity in either Colombia or Venezuela, the children legally don't exist and lack access to basic resources like healthcare, employment, education and freedom of movement. Across the world, at least 10 million people are denied a nationality, but as the Venezuelan immigration crisis grips South America it is these rights that prove most essential to Venezuelan migrants.

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