“When politicians and people say ‘Stop the boats,’ what do they mean? What’s behind those slogans?” Mr. Newman asked in an interview.

Producers trolled the Internet and neighborhoods that had been transformed by an influx of immigrants to find candidates for the series, titled “Go Back to Where You Came From.” Participants were stripped of cellphones and passports before embarking on a 25-day odyssey of rickety boat rides, nighttime immigration raids and, in one case, a patrol through Baghdad in a U.S. military armored personnel carrier.

The series could not be more timely. Australia is embroiled in an acrimonious debate over a plan to send asylum seekers to Malaysia for processing, a move that has drawn criticism from the United Nations. Although asylum seekers arriving illegally by boat, mostly from Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, have traditionally accounted for tiny fraction of the overall number of refugee applications here, their numbers have risen sharply of late, attracting headlines that blare of a supposed deluge of “queue jumpers” and “boat people.”

According to data from the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, in the year from July 1, 2008, to June 30, 2009, 84 percent of asylum seekers arrived by air on tourist or work visas, compared with 16 percent who arrived without documents by boat. From 2009 to 2010, however, 53 percent arrived by air with visas compared with 47 percent by boat without papers.

A recent series of tragedies, though, has shocked the national conscience and spurred the search for solutions. In December, horrified residents of Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean where a detention center had been built in 2009, watched as 27 asylum seekers drowned after their boat shattered against the rocky coast. That debacle, followed by a string of riots over what inmates at a number of detention centers said were inhumane conditions, left the country scrambling for alternatives.

In 2005, clashes at Cronulla Beach in Sydney degenerated into the worst ethnic rioting in recent years as more than 5,000 people descended on the beach area, attacking men of “Middle Eastern” appearance. Adam Hartup, 26, a lifeguard from Cronulla and a participant in the new series, was there.

“My views before were pretty harsh,” he said in an interview. “I didn’t have a great understanding of what an asylum seeker or a refugee was.” What he witnessed during the riots left him wanting to know more.

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His experiences during the filming, he said, which took him to Baghdad, caused “a 180 back flip” in his attitudes.

“To see the devastation and the heartbreak of not just the people I’ve seen, but the millions of people that are in refugee camps and that are trying to seek asylum in other countries is horrendous,” he said.

One participant in the series who questioned why Australia was taking in so many refugees is Raye Colby, 63, who lives across from the Inverbrackie detention center near Adelaide, South Australia.

Ms. Colby spent more than 20 years caring for disabled Australians before recently retiring to work full-time on the farm she shares with her husband. Her grandmotherly manner makes it all the more startling when she says things like: “I could have gone over there and shot the whole lot of them.”

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Thinking about asylum seekers sleeping in what she called “cushy” quarters while “real Australians” with “real problems” like the disabled she cared for lived in what she considered substandard government housing, disturbed her.

“I really hated the way they would come across here in boats and get here and then complain, protest — the government would throw money at them, with the refugee camp in particular across the road from us. That got me on the road to hatred,” she said in an interview.

But then she found herself in the sprawling Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, home to more than 80,000 refugees, including relatives of Ms. Masudi, the Congolese woman she had visited with Ms. Moore in Sydney.

Ms. Colby said Ms. Masudi’s brother-in-law had pulled her aside and told her: “I go to bed at night, Raye, and I put my head on my pillow and I ask God for tomorrow, no more than that, just tomorrow.”

“Because that’s all he’s got,” Ms. Colby said. “He doesn’t have a dream. They don’t dare to dream.”

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Now Ms. Colby says Australia must take far more refugees, a far cry from her starting position.

Not every participant has had a transformational experience.

One of them, Darren Hassan, 42, a descendant of Afghan traders who came to Australia nearly two centuries ago and whose family converted to Christianity, says that, if anything, the series had hardened his views toward asylum seekers.

“Even this show, they said at the start that they were going to be objective, but it’s clearly pro-asylum seeker,” he said. “They’ve not touched a bit on people-smuggling — on the social impact, particularly, that Muslim immigrants or Muslim refugees are having when they come.”

“There are serious issues with all this,” he said. “And all these nongenuine people that are sitting in detention still, when they’re bullying their way to get into our country, even decent, moderate Australians have a problem with this.”

The director of the series, Ivan O’Mahoney, an award-winning Dutch journalist whose HBO documentary “The Boys From Baghdad High” chronicled the lives of Iraqi teenagers during the worst of the violence convulsing that country in 2006, hopes the project may bring balance back to the debate.

“In the Netherlands, politics is a game of consensus. No single party is big enough to govern on its own, so Dutch politicians, in a way, pioneered the Third Way,” he said in an interview.

In Australia, by contrast, “everything is presented as black and white. If Labor comes up with a policy, the Liberals seem to oppose it as a matter of principle.

“Maybe it’s because of the kind of political environment I grew up in,” he said, “that I felt that this television series might be able to contribute to the debate and explore that consensual zone more than the antagonistic zone that everyone is in.”

With the series under way, Australian viewers will find out if he is right.