Give me your tired and your poor: Impact of a large-scale amnesty program for undocumented refugees

Dany Bahar, Ana Ibáñez and Sandra Rozo

Journal of Development Economics, 2021, vol. 151, issue C

Abstract: We study the labor market impacts of the Permiso Especial de Permanencia program, the largest migratory amnesty program offered to undocumented migrants in a developing country in modern history. The program granted work permits to nearly half a million undocumented Venezuelan migrants in Colombia in August 2018. To evaluate the effects of the program, we compare labor outcomes in departments that have larger and lower treatment intensity, before and after the program roll-out. We test the robustness of the difference-in-difference results to using three alternative instrumental variables, finding consistent estimates regardless of the instrument used. We are only able to distinguish negligible effects of the program on the formal employment of workers. These effects are negative for Colombian workers and positive for Venezuelan workers. For the case of Colombian workers, the effects are concentrated in highly educated and in female workers.

Keywords: Migration; Work permit; Refugees; Amnesties (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 O15 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (52)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387821000316
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Give Me Your Tired and Your Poor: Impact of a Large-Scale Amnesty Program for Undocumented Refugees (2020)
Working Paper: Give Me Your Tired and Your Poor: Impact of a Large-Scale Amnesty Program for Undocumented Refugees (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:deveco:v:151:y:2021:i:c:s0304387821000316

DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2021.102652

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig

More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().