Gains from Green Cards: Immigrant Parents' Legal Status and Children's Scholastic Achievement

In order to shed light on the intergenerational consequences of immigration legislation, this paper investigates the impact of the largest amnesty program in the U.S. history (IRCA) on scholastic achievement of immigrants’ children. Using IRCA as a source of exogenous legal status, empirical estimates indicate that immigrants’ legal status improves their children’s math scores by 0.65 of a standard deviation and the reading scores by 0.50 of a standard deviation. The above results account for misreporting in legal status among illegal immigrants by using a two-step semi-parametric method to purge the misreporting bias from conventional IV estimates.