It wasn’t until 1965, with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), that Congress officially contemplated the idea. But the measures were paltry: each year, 17,400 people were given “conditional entry,” as long as they were either fleeing communism or trying to escape a country in the Middle East. The Cold War, rather than any principle of law or humanitarianism, accounted for the narrowness of these terms.
