In the US, the law wasn't reinterpreted. The same interpretation was used in the US, but it was designed for people to use it honestly.
Well that seems to be a kind of interpretation... No laws say the asylum claimants have to be taken at their word and be assumed to be honest. The dreaded elasticity of "muh human rights" comes into this.
And for decades it worked, and was a huge help in defeating the USSR. We definitely want legitimate asylum seekers from communist countries who will grow up to hate communism. We need more of that, in fact.
It worked because the kind of places you wanted to take asylum seekers from were in fact keeping their populations in open air prison, so those who could get out had to be unusually clever or lucky dissidents, filtering out any kind of qualitative or quantitative problem quite effectively. Castro tried to fuck with it a bit with sending criminals and crazy people, but he didn't have the right scale for it.
Meanwhile the third world was under heavy influence of either colonial powers or Soviets, so either way either fuckery would not be tolerated, or open air prison strategy would be copied.
However a scheme to try dump some tens of millions of dumb, sick, criminal and otherwise burdensome people through the border to western countries just because fuck you that's why wasn't something Soviets were willing to do, possibly also their need to maintain face in cold war politics which would make dumping hordes of miserable people out of "communist paradise" to "capitalist exploiters" look very ideologically inconvenient - while modern third world shitholes have no such considerations at all.
The solution to it is actually to have new laws. A few major improvements? Instant denial of asylum if there's no ID. Currently, not having an ID is an advantage in the US system, which is all kinds of bad.
The bleeding hearts will complain that some lose documents so on human rights grounds they can't be discriminated.
Meanwhile since Merkel's Syria policy another problem has arisen - many shitholes have little to no document security features (as who would want those documents anyway), so migrants would get fakes cheaply if they have value as grounds for asylum.
A passport was found near the body of one of the suicide bombers in Paris. It was that of a Syrian man who had arrived on European shores on October 3. It turned out to be a fake. This is just one example of thousands of fraudulent passports in circulation today.
theworld.org
Second, ban any non-Mexican asylum seeker that came through Mexico, saying that they should request asylum from Mexico instead.
Again, many tried, bleeding hearts always sabotage that, while transitory countries like Mexico also red tape pushbacks of such migrants.
Third, the banning of funding to any organization that assists migrants in cheating the system. There's some legalese that would do this, but this stops the US funding NGOs that encourage migration, or more importantly, stops those NGOs from doing this stuff lest they lose funding.
That would have to go as far as arresting either their members or supporters and seizing their accounts as with normal criminal organizations, as it's often private or "private" funding. The legal, political and PR mess around it would be immense.
European story of the rescue ship NGOs should be telling - they got a lot of political and legal cover from the left controlled institutions and still function despite some of them getting outright caught coordinating their activities with foreign criminals.
