HAZLETON, Pa. — Before Arizona’s crackdown on illegal immigrants, before “self-deportation” became the Republican presidential platform in 2012, there was Hazleton.

This working-class city in the Poconos passed the country’s first law aimed at making life so difficult for illegal immigrants that they would pack up and leave.

Hazleton has faded from the national attention it drew with its Illegal Immigration Relief Act in 2006. But as Republicans in Congress advance plans to provide a path to citizenship for the 11 million illegal immigrants in the country, the city presents a test case of whether the party risks leaving behind a critical part of its core constituency: white working-class voters for whom illegal immigration stirs visceral reactions.

A city of 25,000 on a mountain plateau, a former center of coal and rail, Hazleton evokes the white, ethnic Pennsylvania stronghold in “The Deer Hunter,” the 1978 Robert De Niro movie. Local officials and many non-Hispanic residents said last week that they did not accept the reasoning of Republican leaders in Washington, including some 2016 presidential hopefuls, that giving legal status to illegal immigrants was overdue and a political imperative if Republicans are to win more Hispanic voters.