Not many jobs have the potential to impact on people's lives, and those of their children and grandchildren, in such a profound way as that of the immigration officer.

This struck me most powerfully in the early 1990s in the Sudanese refugee camps of Wadi Sherifa and Gedaref, where hundreds of thousands of Eritrean, Ethiopian and Moro people existed in a bleak, unyielding limbo. While interviewing refugees for resettlement to Australia, I met an Australian of Eritrean origin who was scouring the camps for his mother and siblings. This man told me he could not understand how I could do my job knowing that probably one in every four families I rejected would have a family member die in the next 12 months.

The Department of Immigration and Border Protection base in Canberra. Credit:Melissa Adams

The comment stunned me. And it stayed with me for the rest of my career as an Australian immigration officer. It is a comment worth bearing in mind during this election campaign, as the politics about border security and immigration threatens to trump the truth.

The Coalition government has repeatedly used boat arrivals and refugees to attack the opposition and instil fear in the electorate. The issue of people arriving by boat and claiming to be refugees has become 'the' major border security issue. In this debate, boat arrivals are synonymous with fraud, perpetuating the belief that anyone arriving by boat is not only not a refugee, but possibly a criminal or security threat.