"Border Patrol agents destroy water left for migrants in distress along a desert trail near the town of Arivaca, Arizona. More than 178 people died while crossing the Arizona desert during Fiscal Year 2012."

Video taken by No More Deaths, an immigrant-support organization.

As we all know, immigration has been an extremely hot topic this election cycle. The notorious anti-immigrant positions of Donald Trump have raised many weary eyebrows as well as many hands in applause. Immigration is a topic of great disagreement and friction, which could partially be due to the large amount of misinformation being spread. After spending 10 days backpacking in Nogales, Arizona, the location of the most frequently traveled immigrant paths into the U.S., I learned a thing or two about what’s really going on with Mexican immigration to the Unites States. I stumbled upon some of the creepy skeletons in the U.S. closet – which are difficult to look at, yet very important for all of us to see. I encourage us all to open the door together and tear down the common rhetoric being spread about immigration. Here are some things I’ve learned to be true about America’s biggest political controversy.

1. Not all immigrants are violent offenders.

In fact, in Bianca E. Bersani's analysis of her study on immigrant offenses (reflected in the above image), she observes that "the crime rate among first-generation immigrants—those who came to this country from somewhere else—is significantly lower than the overall crime rate and that of the second generation."

Trump has repeatedly brought public awareness to specific incidences of violence caused by undocumented immigrants. On his immigration reform web page, Trump shares that “most recently, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, with a long arrest record, is charged with breaking into a 64-year-old woman’s home, crushing her skull and eye sockets with a hammer, raping her, and murdering her.” Now, don’t get me wrong, undocumented immigrants indeed commit horrible crimes and acts of violence. However, highlighting the fact that these instances of violence were caused by an ‘illegal immigrant from Mexico’ is an attempt at creating a cause-and-effect relationship between the two, when this is not the case at all. In fact, there is no correlation whatsoever between being undocumented and being a violent offender. During the time I spent at the border, I met many traveling immigrants as well as many Border Patrol agents, and the agents were the only ones I ever felt threatened by.

When Trump tells us about violence and rape committed by immigrants, he is telling an extremely one-sided version of the story. Trump fails to mention the acts of violence and sexual assault committed by ‘the good guys’ – the Border Patrol agents.

Trump wouldn’t want us to know about the U.S. Border Patrol agent, Lonnie Swartz, who unnecessarily shot and killed an unarmed 16-year-old boy named Jose Antonio from across the border wall. Trump wouldn’t want us to know about the 18-year-old girl I met in Nogales, Mexico, who was stripped naked by a laughing Border Patrol and then thrown into a freezing cold cell with no blankets. Trump wouldn’t want us to know about the multiple recorded accounts of Border Patrol agents sexually abusing undocumented migrants while in/in transportation to custody.

Trump wouldn’t want us to know about all of these things because then his divisive claims would begin to fall apart at the seams.

2. U.S. policies and interventions have played a large role in the push-factors of immigration.

Building a wall and forcing Mexico to pay for it has been an outstanding position in Trump’s presidential campaign for quite some time now. His reasoning behind this promise, according to his campaigning website, is that Mexico will pay for the wall because their economy is heavily dependent upon ours, implying that the U.S. has a pretty solid grip to twist Mexico’s arm with. He claims that much of Mexico’s profits come from the U.S. market which, in a way, could be true if Trump is talking about all of the exported U.S.-based agricultural corporations that have monopolized Mexico’s farming industry and have taken advantage of its conducive farming conditions and extremely cheap labor laws. In that case, then yes, there is an extremely heavy flow of “Mexican” goods coming into the U.S.

This agricultural relationship between Mexico and the U.S. is in no way beneficial to the people or economy of Mexico. The North American Free Trade Agreement -- NAFTA -- has opened Mexico up as a market for U.S. agricultural corporations products, which has created mass unemployment of the Mexican farmers who can’t compete with the U.S.’s extremely cheap, industrialized prices –– an estimated one million farmers lost their income in Mexico the year after NAFTA went into effect, and another million lost their jobs over the next year. The free trade agreement has also allowed exported U.S. agricultural corporations to exploit the desperate Mexican labor force, which has perpetuated the non-livable Mexican minimum wage of about $4.30 a day, while just on the other side of the border, the U.S. minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. This makes it so that the U.S. minimum wage is 17x that of Mexico (in a 10 hour work day). In reality, this is where all of our jobs are going – not being ‘stolen by immigrants’ coming to the U.S., but simply being exported to Mexico so that corporations can get away with paying their workers a fraction of a sliver of the U.S. minimum wage. Sounds like a good deal for U.S. company owners, but for workers, it’s bad news in both Mexico and the U.S.

3. There is a huge profit incentive behind the criminalization of migrants.

In a country where incarceration is one of the largest profiting businesses (worth more than $70 billion), criminalization of migrants has become the next big marketing strategy. From 1990 to 2009, the number of people incarcerated in for-profit prisons has increased from 7,000 to 129,000 inmates. Due to heightened security and criminalization of migrants after 9/11, a whole new market has been created – while undocumented migrants accounted for about 3.5 percent of the U.S. population in FY 2014, they represented 36.7 percent of federal sentences.

Because of the hyper-militarization of the border, ‘illegal re-entry’ into the United States has become the most-commonly filed federal charge. The over 240 I.C.E. detention facilities, each with a mandatory bed quota of 34,000 detainees per day, are making a huge profit from the criminalization of migrants – over the course of a year, $2 billion of taxpayer dollars is spent on immigration detention (~ $5.5 million per day).

And the number of detainees has just been increasing in recent years due to increased funding of militarization of the border and new policies that heighten the criminalization of migrants.

Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 (aka SB 1070), created in 2010, is a state legislative act that requires law enforcement to check the documentation of any individual that is found to have ‘reasonable suspicion’ of being undocumented – in this case, having brown skin is legally sufficient in providing ‘reasonable suspicion.’ The law also requires those found guilty be locked up, which means hundreds of millions of dollars in profits.

A group called the American Legislative Exchange Council put together the initial draft of what is now called SB 1070. This group includes representatives of major companies, one of which being a representative of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison corporation in the United States. According to reports of Corrections Corporation of America, which were scrutinized by NPR, executives believe immigrant detention is their next big market. CCA is making a profit from incarcerating people and simultaneously has had a seat at the table of influence in the creation of laws that lock people up.

Similar bills have been passed in 16 other states since SB 1070 has gone into effect.

So now what?

Trump is right about one thing: “the costs for the United States have been extraordinary.” We are losing an enormous amount of money to immigrant detainment and we are losing U.S. jobs – but Trump's "build-a-wall" approach is not the solution we need because it is not addressing the root causes of the situation. We need to eliminate or seriously revise NAFTA so that U.S. jobs are brought home and so that Mexico is not such a heavy consumer of cheap U.S. products and can, therefore, begin to heal economically and become more agriculturally independent. We need to voice our concerns about border security’s emerging partnership with the military-industrial complex and the prison-industrial complex. We need to re-humanize undocumented immigrants so that people can see and feel the damage that been inflicted on millions of innocent lives. We need to begin to look as immigrants as people, not numbers, not ‘aliens,’ not criminals.

We need to talk about the things that were supposed to keep quiet.