I will start outright by saying; I’m an immigrant. Only, not that kind of immigrant. I didn’t get in the trunk of a car at midnight, crossed the desert, and ran across a highway during rush hour. I also didn’t come with a temporary visa and stayed.

Yet while I am not that kind of immigrant, their stories are imprinted on my skin. Their shame, mine. Their pain, mine. Their fear mine. Because under any other circumstance, their lives could have been mine.

Destiny is cruel. Sometimes laughable, but mostly cruel. When I ride the highway in El Paso and look across, I see thatched up houses, barely holding on. Even with the gush of winds, the harsh sun, and the sandstorms, they don’t collapse. Like the spirit of an immigrant, the houses refuse to cave amidst the erratic weather.

When I look at our neighbor country, I think how the circumstance of those across the border could have been mine. Or you — person, reading this article. With a flick of the dice, that could have been our lives on the other side of that border. But we are lucky, I guess.

Perhaps you were born in this remarkable developed country or another. Or you’ve overcome high odds and are better off for them. Maybe this immigration thing is nothing but a speck in your world.

I can’t say the same. For me, it is my entire world. I waited a good chunk of my childhood to get papers.

I can’t help it. The more I peel back the immigrant and the immigration story layers, the more I realize how close I am to those stories.

They are in the produce I eat; they are on the buffed floors I walk on, in the well-cut grass or manicured lawns, in the lesson plans my child receives at school. Those kinds of immigrants and I are only an arm’s reach away.

The immigrant hype creates a chasm that is not there. The caricature version of the immigrant who is a rapist, a drug dealer, a gang member, and a criminal, is so easy to believe. Especially if we don’t notice how the hype is nothing more than fear and myth smashed together.

When the Cato Institute conducted a “research based on data from the Texas Department of Public Safety [they] found that, as a percentage of their respective populations, illegal immigrants represented 50 percent fewer criminal convictions than native-born Americans in Texas in 2015.” They also found no link between violent crimes and illegal immigration.

But I didn’t need research to tell me this. Although it is not funny, I often laugh when I hear people drawing an uneducated conclusion between crime and the illegal population. Because an illegal immigrant is the perfect U.S. citizen who follows the law to a ‘T’ so the police won’t apprehend them and deport them.

Nonetheless, I understand why we want to hold on to that myth. It takes away our guilt of feeling like we should do something but not doing anything.

This avoidance of feelings is like what we experience when we look away from a homeless person. When confronted with this person, we sometimes say something to the effect that if we give them money, they will use it on drugs. We say this to ease our guilt from not helping. Some callous humans take it to the extreme and make fun of them or hurt them.

I don’t agree with it, but I get it. Doing any of the things in the above paragraph is easier than feeling uncomfortable, loss while figuring out how we can help, or possibly inadequate or inept if we do.

But if we attempt to understand human motivation we may be able to look at misery in the face. When we understand, then we no longer need to rely on myth. When we let go of these myths, then we can see a human instead of a caricature, and this opens a world of possibilities in human interaction and relations.

Here are some:

If you or your family have suffered from food insecurity, you would have a sense of the desperation that pushes someone to track across a desert and into a foreign country.

If you have ever run for your life; from a shower of bullets, you may come close to the fear of those who seek refuge from a violent, unstable country.

If you’ve ever yearned for a better future for your kids, you will understand why a parent takes their child with them.

I understand it is uncomfortable to look at misery in the face and frightening to give when one already has so little. But you must watch this documentary. You see, this is your chance to look at suffering with the least amount of discomfort and gain some knowledge and humanity from it.

When you do watch Immigration Nation, you will see a man pointing at his heart and saying, “I have a heart,” when recounting to the journalist how ICE agents took his three-year-old son from his arms. Tears will form in his eyes, and a powerless look will cross his face before he tells the interviewer he had no idea where his child was and if he will see him again. The men standing against a wall next to him also break down into tears.

When you watch this scene, I want you to know, that these are proud Latino men who thought of their child and family unprotected and withered under the weight of uncertainty and sorrow.

I want you to look at his face and try as hard as you can not to look away.

In the very first episode, you will see an ICE team leader/supervisor in the N.Y. office whose team lies to tenants to gain entry into their household. You will hear them explain how their training teaches them to say ‘police’ when identifying themselves without saying who they are — ICE.

These same officers will say that they are enforcing the law and following the orders of those above them. Yet no one will take responsibility throughout the documentary for the separation of families, and mistreatment of the people apprehended. The agents will never admit that their practices, at the very least, are immoral.

You may get angry, I know I did when the same team leader referred to the people he arrested as ‘targets.’ You will see him make a game of rounding up as many immigrants as possible. He will use his phone to video the man he apprehended to show off to the other teams, his ‘catch.’ He will also encourage a subordinate to get as many ‘targets’ as he can by any means, and not to come back to the office without ‘targets.’

When you watch, you will take a trip to a small village in Guatemala and see first-hand the level of poverty these people are running from. During an interview, the wife of a man detained at the border exclaimed that they couldn’t afford to send the kids to school that year. Her husband made the decision to cross the border to earn money and put their kids back in school. The wife also dreamed of having a fridge.

If you watch long enough, you will come to find out that the decision to cross illegally did not happen on a whim. It took courage, a sense of duty to provide for family and sacrifice.

One immigrant interviewed wondered, “where are the nice Americans?” While remembering the U.S. missionaries that used to come to his church and give candy to all the kids.

Watching the documentary, I wondered the same thing.

It’s easy to give in to the hype because it takes away our guilt of being able to help and not doing it.

While we embrace the myth that immigrants are criminals, take jobs and benefits away from Americans, did you know…

According to the American Farm Bureau Federation, “at least 50–70 percent of farm laborers in the country today are unauthorized.” This is because not many U.S. workers are willing to take those jobs. The organization theorizes that enacting a strict immigration reform will affect U.S. farmers. The decrease in labor will burden them with an increased workload and hiring U.S. laborers will raise the produce price by 5–6% and decrease their profit.

According to the American Immigration Council, a refugee is a person “who is unable or unwilling to return to his or her home country because of a ‘well-founded fear of persecution’ due to race, membership in a particular social group, political opinion, religion, or national origin.” Each year the president, in consultation with congress, allocates a maximum number of refugees allowed in the country. Since 2009, the only time the U.S. surpassed the number allocations was in 2017 by going past the 50,000 mark to 53,716.

There are three routes to getting legal status in the U.S.:

• Family Reunification, where a family member is legally in the U.S., and that family member asks for their immediate family to join them.
• Employer-Sponsored, is where a U.S. employer employs and sponsors a foreign worker.
• Humanitarian Protection, which is either gained through asylum or refugee status.

If the person came into the U.S. illegally, it would be tough for them to become legal. They will need to leave the U.S. to apply. If they have been in the U.S. illegally for an extended period, they would need to wait to re-enter for up to 10 years. This rule would mean a possible indefinite separation from their family. This person would also need to provide legal paperwork and applications, which may change as they wait, and legal fees. For an immigrant who most likely works a low-paying job in the U.S., the financial burden of applying would be too much. While none of this is impossible, it’s very close to it.

During the second episode of Immigration Nation, a wife of a former Salvadoran police officer lamented that her husband made the wrong choice by following U.S. law. She wished he would have stayed illegally and not reported periodically to the ICE offices.

On one of his visits, an ICE agent found missing paperwork, reported this to his boss, who made the decision to deport her husband. This former Salvadoran police officer used to work with the U.S. by providing tips on identifying gang members.

My story is different. I came to the United States through the family reunification process. While the average wait time is five years, our case took longer.

The wait was so long, I don’t remember my mom and dad during my childhood in the Dominican Republic. I only remember my grandmother, whom to this day I call Mamá because she was essentially my mother.

When I was young, I didn’t understand their sacrifice. Instead, I felt betrayed and angry by their abandonment.

It wasn’t until I was deploying for the first time to Afghanistan in 2004 that I understood my parents. At the gate, my son’s father took my then 18-month child from my arms and turned around to leave. At that moment, in front of the American Airlines gate in the Honolulu Airport, I broke down. It was also then when I understood the pain my parents went through when they left us behind.

I can’t compare any of this to the families in Immigration Nation because my sister and I were the lucky ones. Our parents sent us money from their jobs in the U.S.

With that money, we could afford trips to the U.S. consulate and various Dominican government offices in the capital. We could pay to redo applications and forms when the Dominican or U.S. government changed the requirements. We were fortunate.

While I didn’t flee from persecution or ran across the desert, I understand their choice to do so. If I were in their shoes, I would have done the same, because family means everything to me.

But before you fall into the hype and tell someone to get into this metaphorical line and wait like all the rest, think about what you would do if you were in their shoes.

Put yourself there.

I urge you, at the very least, look at them as humans. Shit, just look at them. It may surprise you at how much alike you are than different. If the dice had rolled any other way, that could have been you.