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A quota, a parole program, and the law that made both unnecessary.

1953–1965 · Case 3 of 15

Unlike the students and scholars already in the country, the people this case covers were still in China, or newly out of it, when they sought American refuge. The Refugee Relief Act of 1953 set aside 2,000 visas specifically for ethnic Chinese refugees, a deliberate carve-out at a time when the standing annual China quota under existing law stood at 105.

The larger mechanism ran through Hong Kong. Attorney General Robert Kennedy opened the Hong Kong Parole Program in May 1962, using parole authority under the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act to admit Chinese refugees who had reached the colony without the visas the quota system would otherwise have required. By the time the program wound down in 1966, it had paroled roughly 15,000 people into the United States.

Both the 2,000-visa carve-out and the 15,000-person parole program existed because the underlying quota law made no other room for a Chinese refugee to enter at scale. The Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965 finally removed the national-origins system that had made the workarounds necessary, and let Hong Kong parolees already in the country adjust to permanent resident status under ordinary law.

~17,000 Chinese refugees moved through the 1953 Act's dedicated visas and the 1962–66 Hong Kong Parole Program, before the 1965 reform ended the quota system both had to work around.

Sources: the Refugee Relief Act of 1953 (Pub. L. 83-203); the Hong Kong Parole Program, 1962–1966, administered under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952; the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965 (Pub. L. 89-236). An unsourced figure of roughly 200,000 Chinese refugees for this period appeared in an earlier internal draft of this case and has been removed; it does not match any documented program total.