The Temporal Borders of Latinx Citizenship

• In Event: Naturalization and the Drivers of Naturalization

Abstract

In the U.S., the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) granted permanent legal status to some Latinx individuals while excluding similarly qualified Latinx migrants solely because of a seemingly arbitrary deadline. To qualify for IRCA, “illegalized” immigrants had to prove they had been living in the U.S. continuously before January 1, 1982. Those who arrived after this deadline, even if just by a day, could not qualify for IRCA though they met all other qualifications. A gap exists within migration and political science literature on immigrants who did not qualify for IRCA only because their date of arrival in the U.S. was past its deadline. For this project, I use the 2006 Latino National Survey (LNS), 1989-1990 Latino National Political Survey (LNPS), and 2008 National Asian American Survey (NAAS) data to determine whether IRCA’s deadline alone influenced whether Latinx migrants became citizens or not. Using a regression discontinuity design to organize the data by migrants’ year of arrival to the U.S. and their citizenship status, I found that Latinx migrants who arrived within five years of IRCA’s deadline and were eligible for the program were more likely to have naturalized, yet some of these results have not been statistically significant.

Author

• Jessica Taghvaiee, University of California, Irvine