Tom Brokaw couldn’t have known, when he spent time in Colorado preparing a report on illegal immigration, that the big bust at the Greeley-based meatpacking plant Swift & Co. was imminent.
He didn’t get to include the dramatic, headline-grabbing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid in his latest documentary.
But he nailed all the issues with dramatic storytelling, using as his focus the Roaring Fork Valley near Aspen.
Asking big-picture questions and standing back, seemingly bemused by some of the impolitic answers, Brokaw quietly continues his journalistic pursuits in America’s heartland, busy in nonretirement.
“Tom Brokaw Reports: In the Shadow of the American Dream” will be broadcast at 7 tonight on KUSA-Channel 9.
The “passionate debate” is brought to life as 11 illegal immigrants pile out of a van, stopped on Interstate 70; as local business owners discuss the moral dilemmas they face in hiring much-needed workers; as workers discuss paying taxes in the belief that it will help their standing with the government.
An NBC News crew spent eight months reporting on “the myths and truths” about illegal immigration, paying particular attention to the social upheaval as the valley turns from white to brown: Members of the historically Caucasian population talk about experiencing an influx of thousands of Latinos, mostly from Mexico, and how that is changing daily life, language, economics and political realities.
The hour-long documentary explores both sides of the divide. A construction company needs unskilled labor for the booming market in hotels and million- dollar homes; local workers choose not to take these “ditch-digging” jobs, while illegal immigrants line up for the opportunity to work.
Latinos new to the valley are changing the way local schools, churches, medical clinics, banking and housing traditionally operate. Brokaw is carefully neutral as he interviews locals about the evolution of American culture. These days, the Carbondale public schools are 80 percent Latino.
“Is it fair for the property owners in this valley to be paying the tab for a lot of Hispanic kids, many of whom probably have parents who came here illegally?” Brokaw asks.
A contractor answers that it’s all about business: “We need an economy that works here.”
A teacher longs for the days when the kids in her class spoke English as a first language; a longtime resident fears the eventual cultural consequences; the brothers who own Gould Construction in Glenwood Springs lament the fact that they can’t hire enough workers to keep up with the boom. They let the camera observe the crudely faked identification documents submitted by applicants who are desperate to work. The camera then visits one overcrowded home full of undocumented workers, where one brother wants to return to Mexico and another is eager to assimilate.
Some established valley residents enjoy the new cultural diversity, others are much less welcoming. Locals dance around the concept of “white flight” as Brokaw presses.
Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo gives Brokaw an earful about how this wave of immigrants is supposedly different from the Italian, Irish, Russian and other waves that came before.
Tancredo, who calls Miami “the third world” and who crusades for immigration “restriction,” is given more than his fair share of face time here.
Naturally, the mind wanders to our celebrity reporter. Seeing Brokaw, a windswept gray eminence on the high plains, in cafes, at job sites and on roads far from the hermetically sealed anchor environs he once occupied, is somehow reassuring. He talks less than Dan Rather does about having reporting in his blood, but he walks the walk.
Of the Big Three, Brokaw has remained most comfortably in the public eye. From his election-night analyses on NBC to last week’s induction into the TV Hall of Fame to this week’s primetime NBC documentary, Brokaw picks his spots.
Peter Jennings is gone, Rather is doing lengthy pieces about lobbyists on cable’s HDNet, Brokaw soldiers on, comfortable in his skin.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
