The United Nations offers three durable solutions to long-standing refugee crises—repatriation, resettlement, and local integration—though local integration is often dismissed by host countries in the Global South as undesired or infeasible (Jacobsen 1996). Recently migration scholars have begun to acknowledge just how widespread local integration has become for both refugees and irregular migrants, despite host government opposition, finding that many migrants and refugees in a variety of contexts have reached a point of economic and social integration (“de facto integration”) despite national and international policy climates (Hovil 2014). While de facto integration provides benefits such as flexibility and the opportunity to exist in relative anonymity, it also leaves migrants and refugees in a precarious and informal position, subject to rapidly changing security environments and absent important legal protections. Simultaneously, political science has developed a renewed focus on practices of informality (Helmke and Levitsky 2004), which insert themselves into the space of tension between the coercive authority of the state and the state’s legitimacy (Davis 2018). Further, recent scholarship has argued that informality does not necessarily result from low state capacity; instead, states may choose to practice forbearance and refrain from interference and engagement when they perceive benefits from restraint (Moss 2014; Gallien 2018). In the case of de facto integration for migrants and refugees, host states may actually permit and even encourage economic and social integration, even as they publicly decry such practices. This paper asks: how do migrants and refugees contextualize these practices of informality—in terms of what is permissible, and what is forbidden—in rapidly changing and securitized host state environments? Drawing on three years of fieldwork and more than 150 semi-structured interviews, this paper demonstrates that migrants and refugees residing in countries like Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, and Turkey find access to livelihoods, healthcare, ways of sending their children to school, and engage in social and sometimes political activities, all through state-sanctioned practices of informality. The findings have important implications for the way in which scholars consider host state engagement and informal institutions in countries of the Global South.