Australia since 1788 has been made of and by immigrants. It still has an intake program of over 150,000 new settlers each year, yet the arrival of boats carrying a few hundred asylum seekers invariably causes a frenzy.

Australia is not unique in viewing with alarm the phenomenon of irregular migration, but its responses are (and apparently always have been) completely out of proportion to the threats posed.

In immigration history, fear is an almost constant feature. The indigenous inhabitants had everything to fear from the first white settlers. For the convicts and jailers on board those ships, the ancient land, its animals and peoples were forbiddingly strange. The settlers' sense of cultural isolation grew as the colonies expanded, fostering a defensiveness that made immigration control a legislative priority.

The constitution does not provide directly for citizenship, but confers on parliament the power to make laws regarding naturalisation, aliens and immigration. That ensures politics looms large in determining who is considered ''Australian''.

The fears underlying White Australia Policy were given visceral expression during and after World War II. Newsreel images included graphics tracing the menace of invasion from populous Asian countries. The very real threats from the Imperial Japanese Army gave way to more inchoate fears about Vietnam first and then Indonesia.

The eventual challenge was constituted not by an invading army, but by asylum seekers coming in search of protection. Australia's response has revealed the extent to which fear has shaped our national character.

About 23,000 people have come by boat without authorisation since 1978, averaging a little more than one ''boat'' person every two days since the end of the Vietnam War. In spite of the modesty of these numbers, the phenomenon has engendered extraordinary responses from government.

Public support for immigration programs generally has always been tenuous. Electoral support has remained strong for the harshest measures taken by the Coalition government in and after 2001 - the interdiction and ''push back'' of unauthorised boat arrivals, and the processing of refugee claims offshore. This is so even though distaste has grown for the excesses of that period during which children and vulnerable individuals were detained for long periods in remote and punitive conditions.

The cost of the policies is easy to articulate. In financial terms, constructing detention facilities in remote locations has been exorbitant. Over $1 billion was spent housing and processing barely 1500 asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus Island between 2001 and 2004; more than $400 million was spent constructing the high-security facility on Christmas Island commissioned by the Labor government in 2008. Even at the height of the global financial crisis, money was no object.

The sometimes appalling conditions in the detention centres have inflicted terrible injuries - both physical and psycho-social - on all those involved. Hundreds of people have died at sea trying to seek asylum in Australia. Between December 1998 and December 2001, it is estimated that 891 boat people lost their lives. These deaths cannot be blamed solely on uncaring people smugglers. At least some of the deaths were related directly to push-back operations.

Conservative politicians have become adept at exploiting the popular (almost acculturated) fear of outsiders as an electoral weapon. Such strategies may come at great cost to the cohesiveness of a multicultural, multiracial society like Australia's. Electorally, however, they are very effective.

Once out of the bottle, the fear genie seemed to take hold of progressive politics. Kevin Rudd tried to find a balance between compassion and control, but the message was confused. It translated into disastrous opinion polls. Julia Gillard then told those alarmed by ''boat people'' that they did not deserve to be demonised as ''rednecks''.

It is clear no one sees the asylum seekers as a direct threat to Australia. If this were the case, the opposition would be working with the government (as Labor did in 2001). Instead, it has sought to score political points by announcing loudly to the world that Australia is now a ''soft touch'' country with weak border controls. One might well suggest the opposition's loose lips have helped to bring the ships which are causing such anxiety. People smugglers seeking clients in troubled countries could not hope for more effective advertising of their product. Having tried a softer and more humane approach, Labor is now running scared of an electorate energised by opposition rhetoric.

In an age of instant communications, nuanced explanations of international law and human rights are difficult to deliver. Conversely, it is easy to characterise unauthorised arrivals as illegal invaders: at worst as fearful harbingers of all things dreadful; at best as queue jumpers. The asylum seekers' vulnerabilities are lost. The compassionate response is denigrated as folly.

Although intended as a circuit-breaker, Gillard's speech to the Lowy Institute last month takes the country back to the dark days of the Tampa affair. It perpetuates a cycle of irrational policymaking and profligate spending, all likely to end in continuing human rights abuse, injury and more deaths, and continuing damage to Australia's international standing.

Pushing back the boats is no answer because there is no country in the region that would take them. Neither will establishing processing centres in Third World countries stop the boats. Historically, this has only ever been achieved by agreements with the countries at the source of the asylum flows. With Vietnam, it was the Orderly Departure Program. In the mid-1990s a memorandum of understanding with China stopped the flow of boats from there.

The number of refugees who come to Australia as asylum seekers - by plane or boat - is minute in world terms. The numbers are manageable. Most come because of prior connections with communities in Australia. It should be possible to work with those communities to put the people smugglers out of business. Instead, we threaten these same communities with heavy criminal penalties if they so much as admit to helping those who use irregular means to seek Australia's protection from persecution.

Mary Crock is professor of public law at the University of Sydney. This is an extract from her essay in the latest edition of the journal Dialogue.

Scapegoating Boat People