‘How Democracy Works,' 12-Part Documentary, Explains Why Comprehensive Immigration Reform Hasn't Passed Yet [VIDEO]

If there’s a sweeping message to “How Democracy Works Now: 12 Stories,” Michael Camerini and Shari Robertson’s 12-part, behind-the-scenes documentary series on the drafting (and defeating) of comprehensive, bipartisan immigration reform legislation since 2001, it might be this: the people involved believe in what they’re doing.

That might be a tough sell for some of the American public. Just 10 percent of them said they had a “great deal” of confidence in Congress last year, the lowest since Gallup pollsters started asking that question in 1973. But the filmmakers say they’re sanguine about the odds that a comprehensive reform will pass Congress in 2014 -- “congenitally optimistic,” as Camerini puts it. In August 2001, when they first set out, the two rushed to buy a camera and organize what they’d be shooting. That summer, talk was that then-President George W. Bush and then-Mexican President Vicente Fox were trying to put their foot on the gas pedal on an immigration accord they’d been discussing off and on since February. On Sept. 6, Bush met with Fox, and afterward told the nation he supported legalization for the estimated 9.3 million immigrants who were living in the US without documentation at the time.

“When we started out, we didn’t know what kind of project it was going to be,” says Robertson. “We had just come off of a fairly successful run with a feature doc called ‘Well-Founded Fear’” -- an Official Selection at the Sundance Festival in 2000 and Grand Jury Prize Winner at that year’s Docfest -- “and we felt like it was going to be a historic moment. Something huge was going to happen with immigration reform. We thought it was going to be another single, feature doc. ‘They’ll pass this thing in a year, and we’ll be in and out.’”

Then, as the film tells it, came the events of 9/11, and with it all the built-up bipartisan good will on immigration evaporated. What had previously been a question of economics, mostly, got tossed into the national security pile. Six years of filming and five years of editing followed. The result is a feat of political journalism and a chronicle of lawmakers and their staffers, lobbyists from organized labor and business interests, grassroots activists, and immigrant advocates as they haggle over legislative details and mount campaigns for and against state-level initiatives. The filmmakers’ cameras are permitted a remarkable degree of access to these negotiations, which Camerini and Robertson attribute to their frankness from the jump about their intentions as well as (again) the convictions of the people involved. The subjects also might’ve been encouraged by the limitations of the cameras’ gaze, which remains pretty much restricted to what these people do when they’re in their work clothes. That means that the bile which often casts its shadow over immigration debates stays off-camera. The faces -- even that of Tom Tancredo -- are always respectable ones.

Camerini and Robertson are currently shooting material in Washington, D.C. for another film in the ongoing series, although they say if comprehensive reform isn’t passed by the end of 2014, they won’t pursue the topic into the next Congressional session. Check out the trailer to “How Democracy Works: 12 Stories” below.