Abstract
Building on Colombia’s transformation into the world’s largest recipient of Venezuelan migrants, this article analyses the evolution of administrative sanctioning law in migration matters. The first part argues that the historical disinterest of Colombian legal scholarship in migration is embedded in a long-standing relationship between administrative law and the foreign population, shaped by the logic of the science of police and by the civilisation/barbarism paradigm that ran through the colonial period, the Regeneración and much of the twentieth century. The second part examines the sanctioning regime in force and the process of constitutionalisation driven by the Constitutional Court. The article concludes that the broad discretion with which Migración Colombia operates today is largely an inheritance of that historical logic and that, despite jurisprudential advances, a structural gap persists between the constitutional mandate and institutional practice, in which the acción de tutela has become the ordinary remedy for protecting rights that should be guaranteed from the outset of the administrative procedure.