 So, what I'm going to do today is to present the impacts of a massive regularization program that took place in Colombia in 2018. The program regularized around 440,000 Venezuelan migrants that had arrived to the country. And what I'll do is that I'm going to present two or three papers depending on how I'm doing on time with time. And the impacts of these programs on labor outcomes and welfare for the local population and for the beneficiaries of the program. So, I don't need to give much context here in this conference because you already know, but today we have around 73 million forced migrants. Many of them are internally displaced persons and what is important is that most of these forced migrants relocate in developing countries. So about 85% of the refugees are relocating in developing countries and not necessarily in developed countries. And one of the most important policy issues to discuss is access to labor markets. This is a politically sensitive issue. Some politicians on some groups of the population say that we should protect access to labor markets or ban access to labor markets to refugees to protect the vulnerable population in the destination countries. And the argument being that if we provide access to refugees it's going to hurt the more vulnerable population. But refugees need to work and need to generate income. They will anyways work in informal markets which are the markets where the most informal population live. So we have a host of policies for labor market access to refugees. We have policies such as in Bangladesh where refugees are not allowed to work. In the middle we have other countries that provide access to labor markets but with conditionalities or with restrictions or only restricted to some sectors. And we have the case of Colombia which is a program that I'm going to talk about where they provided wide access to labor markets to the refugees. So what I'll do in this talk is that I'm going to discuss the effects of this massive regularization program on labor markets for the locals and migrants and in I stress locals because it's important to understand what's happening to both groups of the population and also what happens to the welfare and access to state services for the beneficiary migrants. And a little bit on health status and on policy implications. So this is not going to be an academic paper but it's more going to be I'm going to concentrate more on policy implications. So by now we have in Latin America one of the largest outflows of population in the region in a very short period of time. Venezuela and we have had around four or five million Venezuelan migrants that have migrated during the last years. A large percentage of them are staying in Colombia about 1.7 million and most of them are irregular migrants either because they overstayed the visa or because they crossed the border illegally. Irregularly I prefer to say it that way. So what was the program that we are going to evaluate? It's called the PIP and basically what happened in 2018 is that the Colombian government decided to do a census of irregular migrants. The purpose of the census was not to provide permits or to provide regularization to the migrants. The purpose was to know where they were located and which were the social demographic characteristics. Not all the migrants registered in these census but it was about 440,000 migrants that registered. Two weeks before leaving office the president then in office decided that he was going to regularize all those migrants. Nobody knew that that was going to be the case. The refugees did not know that that was going to be the case. So he said they could be regularized and that the only thing they needed to do was to register online to request for the Permiso Especial de Permanencia, a special permit. What was the permit about? It's not a visa that's important to stress but it's basically a legal migratory status for two years whereby migrants have a work permit to work without any restrictions or any conditionalities on labor markets and it provides migrants as well with access to health and to the health and education system, to child care services and basically all the services for the vulnerable population and access to financial services and private services as well. So what I'll do now is to show you a bit what are the impacts of this program and first I'm going to concentrate on the migrants. What happened with access to labor markets? We have two findings. The first one is that labor income for migrants increased significantly and it increased because they had more access to formal labor markets but also what seems to be an increase in bargaining power in informal labor markets because now they were legal. So they were able to negotiate their wages with their employers. And what we see is an increase of labor income of about 15% and also they work more but what I think is more interesting is that the reservation wages increases and also they are more satisfied with their work. So they were able also to switch jobs, to find jobs, better jobs for their skills because what happens with Venezuelan migrants in Colombia is that they are one year of education. They have one year more of education than Colombia's. So even though some of them kept their jobs, many of them also were changing jobs and we believe that that's because they were trying to look for more high skilled jobs according to their profiles. And what happens to locals? Because that's very important. We have this large inflow of refugees. They are competing with locals but what happened here is that what it seems to be happening is that they are easing the pressure on informal labor markets as they are moving to formal labor markets. And I forgot to say that there was a 12 percentage point formalization for these migrants. So what we see is that the short-term impact and here I stress short-term impact is negligible for the locals, especially for those working on formal labor markets. If we have a two-fold increase on pep holders, what we find is that indeed there is a reduction on the likelihood on the probability of being employed for the locals but the reduction is small, it's 0.15 percent. And what we find for those working on the formal labor markets is that there is no impact on monthly wages, no impact on hourly wages, and no impact on hours worked. What are the potential explanations? Because this is a large program so we would have expected more. The first one is that the short-term impact had not kicked in yet, no? We were just, it was a short-term impact so we don't know what's happening in the medium term and large long-term term. Sandra Rosso, which also did this paper with me, she's studying that at the moment. The second is that migrants are not willing to transition to formal labor markets because they already have the access to all the social services. But we do believe that this is highly unlikely because the wage premiums from moving to the informal to the formal labor market is quite high. The third one, which we believe it's very likely, is that firms are really not hiring migrants, in spite of them having the possibility of working in the formal labor markets. They don't have enough information about the pep program. They have higher transaction costs and very importantly so there's still xenophobia and discrimination against the migrants. And another possibility is that the negative effects of this additional labor competition is upset by an increase in aggregate demand because of the migrants. What happens to welfare and access to safe services? What we find is that there is really a large impact on welfare. For aggregate consumption for the whole household, the increase is 22%. When we look at it at consumption per capita is about 30%. And also what we see that is very important is that there is a decrease on the incidence of chronic anxiety and depression. So we see an improvement in welfare defined broadly. Also, what we see is that there is an increase, an important increase in access to state services for migrants. Remember, this is an important dimension of pep. First, it increases the registration to CISBEN, which is the gate to enter all social programs in Colombia for the vulnerable population. So they are registered. Also, there is an increase in subsidized health care and access to health services and children vaccination. Here I must stress that migrants can also access health services, but through emergency rooms, whereas the migrants can do it through their health services. When we were launching the survey, the COVID started. So we had to do the survey by phone and it was quite challenging. But what we find also is that these migrants seems to be better able to cope with the COVID pandemic. Not only they had more access to state services, but they had higher vaccination rates. And when they got COVID, they were able to be treated as well. But also, what we find is that the economic impacts of COVID are lower. So here in both are the three that are statistically significant and they were less likely to be evicted and they had to recur less to selling assets. Why is this important? Because having access to health is extremely important for the migrants. In the mid- and mid-epidemic, you really need people to be reporting and going to health services to say that they contracted the disease. And what we find in a study that we did with Santa Rosa... Annemarie, you've got two minutes left. Yes, I'm almost done. What we find in a study we did with Santa Rosa is that the large inflows of migrants into a country, in this case Colombia, increase the incidence of infectious diseases. So you really need to provide access to health services to the migrants in order to be able to control these epidemics or these transitions of infectious diseases. What are the conclusions? What we find is that regularization programs help. And here we have an important thing when we think about programs for the refugees. Because most of the times these programs are concentrated on humanitarian assistance, but refugees are seldom returned to their home countries. So other programs, such as the regularization programs, may improve the refugees to be self-reliant and to generate income. So we find that this really improves the lives of migrants, may maximize the positive effects of long-term income growth because of productivity increases. They are moving to jobs where they are better matched, as I say. It releases the pressure on informal labor markets and also fiscal pressures on the long-term. And as I say, it may promote self-reliance for refugees. But what we find again also, and I'm not showing the results here, is that really the devil is in the details. The implementation has a lot of challenges. First, there might be some political backlash and xenophobia. There is a lot of misinformation about the provisions of the regularization program, not only for the private sector, but also for the refugees, and very surprisingly for the people working in state institutions. And what we find also is that regularization is the first step. Once you get regularized, you need a lot of complementary programs to reduce the barriers to access to social services and many other things. And lastly, to reduce these political backlash and xenophobia is very important to invest in programs for migrants and the receiving communities. So thank you very much.