🔎 Facty Friday Edition #90: Work Permit Rights and Effects for Migrants and the Host Country Population
This edition of Facty Friday examines the impact of a large-scale amnesty program in Colombia that provided the right to work permits and the right to access social welfare programs on undocumented migrants and the host country population.
The positive impact of work permits and social welfare rights for forced migrants
A recent study used survey data from 2,232 forced migrant families from Venezuela who are living in Colombia, and compared across forced migrant who qualified for the 2018 Permiso Especial de Permanencia (PEP) amnesty program with those who did not qualify for the PEP because they arrived after the cutoff date. The PEP amnesty program offered Venezuelan undocumented migrants in Colombia work permits and the ability to qualify for social welfare programs. This research found that PEP beneficiaries experienced higher consumption and income, greater physical and mental health, and higher social safety net registration rates, compared with forced migrants not in the PEP amnesty program. Forced migrants who qualified for the PEP program realized a 10 percent increase in formal labor market work compared to forced migrants not covered by the PEP amnesty. These results point to large and positive effects of the PEP amnesty program on migrant welfare and suggest that granting the rights to work and access social welfare programs may be an effective integration policy in the Global South for forced migrants.
How do forced migrant amnesty programs affect labor market opportunities for the receiving population in the Global South?
A recent study used administrative data to examine the labor market impacts of the Permiso Especial de Permanencia (PEP) amnesty program, which granted Venezuelan forced migrants the right to work permits in Colombia. This research found a negligible effect of the PEP amnesty program on Colombian workers in the formal labor sector overall and that it had small and negative effects on certain groups such as the highly educated and female Colombian workers in the formal labor market. The negative effect on educated Colombian workers is explained by the fact that, on average, Venezuelan workers are more educated than Colombian workers, while no explanation is offered for the negative effect for female Colombians. For Venezuelan forced migrants, the working rights granted by the PEP amnesty program resulted in increased access to the formal labor market through work permits, but integration into formal sector work was sluggish in the first 14 months after the program started. These results add to a new literature on the effects of regularization for forced migrants in a developing country context and highlight the complexity in shaping outcomes for migrants and the host population.