So, with our lame title, and generous help from the Senate Radio and TV Gallery in the form of an official Press Pass, we were off.  By August of 2001, we were filming inside the Senate as well as getting introduced to immigration policy experts and activists both pro and con, lobbyists from business and labor and advocates of all stripes, just as President Bush was preparing to host President Vicente Fox of Mexico at the White House. It looked as though a huge immigration overhaul would happen before the year was out, and we'd have a movie of a beautiful process where a good idea becomes law in less than a year.  But we'd only been shooting a couple of weeks when the terrorist attacks of September 11th took place.  On that day, our story, like so many things, changed forever.

We decided to keep filming, if we could. The tale we ended up finding took us into pretty unexpected places.  For the next six years, we did our best just to follow the idea of the comprehensive immigration reform wherever it seemed to be happening -- Iowa, Kansas, California, and Arizona, as well as Capitol Hill.  And in following that trail, the journey taught us more about how democracy does in fact work than we ever imagined there was to know.

So that's what we believe this series turned out to be: twelve discrete films about several dozen fascinating people in all kinds of places, each connected by a commitment to change the way that the United States handles the bedrock national identity issue of immigration.  Together, the twelve films make up one very big story, and though we surely didn't realize it at that point, it's exactly the story we would have wanted to find in 2001.