But it turns out that's not all we are telling them. We are also telling them they should just give up. This week, ABC radio's PM revealed that Immigration Department officials are rejecting some asylum seekers on the basis of an informal verbal interview. No application. No lawyer. No hearing. No process really. Just the uninformed, premature judgment of a bureaucrat trying to dispense with an irritant.

It's the very definition of insidious. So insidious the department has even given it a euphemistic, bureaucratic name, ''screening out'', as though it's a routine classification process. ''Any person who is screened out progresses towards removal from Australia,'' a media release from the department says. Progresses. Like they're getting somewhere. Sounds better than ''shunted back home without a hearing'' or ''dumped in detention limbo'', which is what it actually means.

The idea is so brazen: to trade on the ignorance and powerlessness of asylum seekers. It's not that asylum seekers lose their rights. They don't. At least in theory they retain the right to apply for refugee status. They have the right to a lawyer. But if you are ''screened out'', you are not told this. If you happen to know it, and have the inordinate confidence to call an immigration official's bluff, good for you. If not, your rights are pretty much rhetorical. ''If anyone in immigration detention requests access to a lawyer, we facilitate that request,'' the department says. You just have to assert rights you don't know you have.

Welcome to Kafka's Australia, where rights are guaranteed, but preferably forgotten. So we maintain that we respect due process and human rights, even if it's clear we don't always like them very much. We have been doing this for ages. ''Screening out'' has been around for the best part of a decade; long enough for the department to call it a ''long-standing policy over successive governments''.

And if you believe the lawyers who work in this area, it's part of a number of bureaucratic practices designed to prevent asylum seekers accessing the few rights they have.