Legal Status and Political Power: Evidence from the IRCA Legalization Program

Title: Legal Status and Political Power: Evidence from the IRCA Legalization Program (with Andrea Bernini)

Abstract: We study the political consequences of large-scale immigrant legalization by examining the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which granted permanent legal status to nearly three million undocumented Hispanic migrants. Exploiting geographic variation in IRCA exposure across U.S. counties, and combining this with newly digitized data on over 12,000 Hispanic elected officials spanning 1984–1994, we find that legalization significantly increased Hispanic descriptive representation at the local level and facilitated the upward mobility of existing Hispanic officeholders. These effects are concentrated in entry-level positions such as school boards and lead to stepwise progression to more influential municipal and county offices. We further show that IRCA-induced representational change altered local governance: counties with greater exposure reallocated education spending from salaries to capital investments and saw compositional shifts in the public-sector workforce, including a rise in Hispanic (particularly female) teachers and a corresponding decline in the number of white teachers. Our findings highlight the role of legal status as a driver of political inclusion and institutional change, with implications for representation, policy priorities, and public service delivery.