It seems to me that the only way an immigrant could claim automatic asylum was if their country of origin appeared on a State Department list of qualifying nations. Ie. a repressive communist regime (North Korea, Soviet Union, Cuba, GDR, Albania...) or a nation that was experiencing a violent civil war (Nicaragua, El Salvador...). If your nation wasn’t on that list... sorry.
I remember an apartment building full of Iranian college students at Penn State. The Shah fell and their status was up in the air. They were here on student visas, but when they expired the Iranian students had to go home because the State Department under Jimmy Carter didn’t see fit to put Iran on “The List”.
Jimmy Carter just as surely sent those students to their deaths, knowingly.