Alfonso Cuarón Admits He Has To Play 'I Directed Harry Potter' Card With Immigration

Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign has started an eye-opening debate about immigration. For many years, we have known about discrimination towards minorities but for some reason, Latinos never came forward with personal experiences, until now. When Trump said, "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending the best. They're not sending you, they're sending people that have lots of problems and they're bringing those problems," he began a Latino movement like we’ve never seen before.

Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón joins the list of celebrities that have something to say about immigration and recently shared his personal experience with the media, “The problem is not immigration, but the attitude towards immigration,” he said at the London premiere of “Desierto,” a film directed by his son Jonás, which portrays immigration from the POV of “the other,” a Mexican immigrant played by Gael García Bernal.

Cuarón also mentioned that being Mexican and traveling with a Mexican passport is not necessarily easy nowadays which is why sometimes he has to bring up the fact that he directed “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” as an easy way in, “You don’t know how difficult it is to have a Mexican passport to travel. You don’t know how many hours I’ve had to spent in those little office where they check all my documents and then when they ‘google’ my name they let me in because I directed ‘Harry Potter.’ Harry Potter has helped me a great deal with immigration.”

Sitting with a group of journalists at the London Film Festival, Cuarón pondered on what makes him worthy of a “special treatment” when many others fellow Mexicans and Latinos are being mistreated, “I have witnessed conversations where I hear people speaking badly of immigrants and I step in saying ‘I am also an immigrant’…I’ve been fortunate to be something like a luxury immigrant but, why do I get acceptance and others don’t?”