Dany Bahar (Brookings) and Sandra Rozo (Marshall School of Business of USC)

Published on September 2, 2020 – Updated on September 9, 2020
Date
Le 09 September 2020 De 17:30 à 18:30
Informations complémentaires :5.30 pm CET on Zoom

Webinar: The Economics of Migration

Give me Your Tired and Your Poor: Impact of a Large-Scale Amnesty Program for Undocumented Refugees

joint with Ana María Ibáñez

Abstract

Between 2014 and 2019 over 1.4 million refugees fled from Venezuela to Colombia as a result of a humanitarian crisis, many of them without a regular migratory status. We study the labor market impacts in Colombia of the Permiso Temporal de Permanencia program, the largest migratory amnesty program offered to undocumented migrants in a developing country in modern history. The program granted regular migratory status and work permits to nearly half a million undocumented Venezuelan migrants in Colombia in August 2018. To identify the effects of the program, we match confidential administrative data on the location of undocumented migrants with department-monthly data from household surveys and compare labor outcomes in departments that were granted different average time windows to register for the amnesty online, before and after the program rollout. We do not distinguish any sizable or significant effects of the program.

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