Mexican Billionaire Carlos Slim Creates Website to Help Immigrants in U.S.; Teaches Lessons to DREAMers in Math, History

One of the world richest men is helping people from his country who want to call the United states home, by launching a website for recent Mexican immigrants called Acceso Latino. While Carlos Slim, the Mexican telecommunications billionaire and the world's second richest man at $78 billion, might be getting more attention for calling for a shortened work week, he's also winning praise for helping newly arrived Mexican immigrants succeed with a website geared toward helping them out.

Just last week the Carlos Slim Foundation launched Acceso Latino, which is a free website that's all in Spanish. It gives readers information on education, health, employment training and culture. The website also includes online classes in English and has information on the government's Dream Act. 

"Acceso Latino will put valuable knowledge at the fingertips of everyone who wants to learn new skills and engage with their community," Slim said in a statement. "It is a simple but powerful resource that can potentially help millions of people improve their lives." According to reports there are some 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, and Hispanics make up a majority of the 40 million immigrants who now live in the United States.

Slim's idea was to create an online portal for self-improvement. The Pew Hispanic Center says that 33 million out of 52 million Latinos in the United States identify as Mexican. But according to the Slim foundation, of the 80 percent of Hispanics who can connect to the internet, many complain about not being able to find helpful information.

It took 18 months to create the site that will hopefully help U.S.-based Latinos. The site also has online job training portals that use information from Khan Academy, MIT-Open Course Ware, as well as Coursera, Academica institute, Harvard, Stanford and Mexico's National University (UNAM). The site also has information on "human and labor rights and has a special section on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA - also known as the Dream Act - where it explains what it is and who qualifies for it," reports the Dallas Morning News.

The trade courses offered are for training in plumbing, construction, sales and computers.