As the immigration debate continues to heat up in Congress, the stories of the millions of undocumented individuals in the U.S. continue to surface -- and award-winning director Davis Guggenheim is behind a recent online project which aims to spotlighting these narratives.
To document the stories of the estimated two million undocumented “DREAMers” in the United States, Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs, and Guggenheim have launched TheDreamIsNow.org.
“When you meet this people you see stunning potential and you also see what this country is all about and if we deny these people our best and our brightest than we are losing who we are as a country,” Guggenheim told HuffPost Live host Josh Zepps. (Watch Full Segment Above)
Via the site's short interactive documentary built from the dozens of personal tales submitted by DREAMers online, the director of “Waiting for Superman” and “An Inconvenient Truth,” hopes the country will understand the need for comprehensive immigration reform.
“If we solve this problem it’s not only good for the idea of this country, but it’s good for the bottom line,” Guggenheim added. “If we get these people into our system, they are paying taxes, they are buying into our healthcare and they are inventing new things; and we are the beneficiaries of their great potential.”
During the HuffPost Live segment, Terrence Park, a Mathematics and Applied Statistics major at UC Berkeley, told Zepps he became undocumented due to a lawyer’s mistake during his green card process. Park is involved with the Dream Is Now project and listed the opportunities legislations such as the DREAM Act can offer to undocumented youth like him.
“The story is always the same, they grow up buying into this idea, their teachers say ‘Believe in the American Dream, work really hard, get good grades and anything is possible’,” Guggenheim said. “And all these kids do that and then suddenly they realize ‘Wait, it’s possible for the kids sitting next to me but it’s not possible for me’."
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