Reproducibility package for From Shadows To Society: Medium-Run Effects Of Regularization On Forced Migrants In Colombia

We estimate the medium-run effects of a large program that granted Venezuelan forced migrants in Colombia regular legal status, the right to work, and access to social protection, measuring outcomes 4.5 years after the program was launched. The program was announced unexpectedly and applied retroactively to migrants registered before a sharp date cutoff, which lets us implement a fuzzy regression-discontinuity design on a two-wave panel survey we collected. The medium-run gains are most pronounced on the social margins. At the cutoff, eligible migrants report social integration
0.98 standard deviations higher and a prosocial-behaviors index 1.13 standard deviations higher than ineligible peers. Both are statistically indistinguishable from zero in the short run and emerge only in the medium run, driven by the accumulation of years under stable legal status. The economic gains, by contrast, are visible immediately and largely persist. Eligible migrants earn 67 percent more in monthly labor income and sit 2.6 standard deviations higher on a service access index by the medium run,
and their housing quality rises from 0.61 to 1.24 standard deviations between waves. Fiscal savings from regularization rise from 42 to 68 percent of the irregular-household cost between waves. The findings show that the social integration of forced migrants, their prosocial trust toward the host society, and the fiscal returns of regularization to host countries strengthen only with years of stable legal status, not with the act of legalization itself.