unitdying to get in原文

1、Unit 10 Dying to get in Two weeks ago, President Bush toured the southwest and promised to spend more than ever before to stop illegal immigrants from crossing our 2,000-mile border with Mexico. Its not the first time a president has pledged to do that. In there early 90s, the Clinton administration

2、 also vowed to tighten the US-Mexican border. Since then, the US government has tripled the budget for border control, spending a small fortune on surveillance technology, not to mention thousands of additional border patrol agents. All of that was supposed to make it harder for illegal immigrants t

3、o cross over in cities and towns along the border.And it did. So why are some of the same people who designed the strategy now saying its been a huge waste of taxpayers money? Because its done nothing to stop migrants from coming here illegally. What it has done, they say, is to force those migrants

4、 to cross remote and treacherous stretches of desert, where many are dying.Episode 2: The death toll is so high that the Border Patrol now has a special unit whose only job is to help migrants in trouble. Officer Garrett Neubauer has just received a distress call about 20 miles north of the border i

5、n southern Arizona.Neubauer: “ What we had is a person who walked out to one of the roads, flagged down some agents, waved them down and stated that he had left his friend out on the desert.”The migrant theyre looking for is an 18-year-old Mexican named Abran Gonzales, who has been wandering in the

6、desert for seven days. Agents have narrowed the search area and have found one of his shoes.Neubauer: “ Thats what were looking for, and thats why I wanted to see his shoe. Just to kind of get an idea of what his other shoe looks like. So I know what Im looking for on the ground. It sounds to me lik

7、e hes kind of out of it. Hes dehydrated. His condition is going downhill, so hes probably not thinking rationally.”Agent Neubauer has good reason to be concerned. We took a first-hand look at the paths taken by migrants through the desert this summer when temperatures 4 hovered above 100 degrees for

8、 weeks at a time. This year, the Border Patrol has reported a recorded 464 deaths, but by all accounts the number is much higher because of bodies that havent been found.Dr Bruce Parks is Tucsons Medical Examiner.Correspondent: “How long have you been here?”Parks: “17 years.”Correspondent: “ Have yo

9、u ever seen anything like this?”Parks: “No.” There are so many bodies, they wont fit in the vaults in the corners morgue.When we visited, Dr. Parks had found a place to put an extra 60 bodies.Parks: “So this is the refrigerator truck that we had to rent at the cost of $1,000 a week:Correspondent: “B

10、ecause you dont have enough room in there for the bodies, you have to put them in here?”Parks: “Right.”12 years ago, things were very different. Back then no migrants died in the desert. Thats because it was easier to come in through American cities along the border. Too easy, according to Mark Reed

11、, who was the top immigration official in San Diego.Reed: “When I got there, our inspectors were hiding in the inspection booths for fear of stepping out and being run over, literally trampled by people running through the port of entry itself and through the booths where the cars were, over the top

12、 of immigration inspectors if necessary.”Correspondent: “How many would come at one time?”Reed: “There were groups of 500 people running up the southbound lanes of I-5.:Episode 3:These pictures are from back then. The migrants had figured out that if there were enough of them, most of them could get

13、 through. The stampeds occurred with such frequency that they became a public relations embarrassment to government officials. The Clinton administration decided something had to be done. Huge metal walls went up, high-tech surveillance systems were purchasedand they did seal off major cities along

14、the border, but not the mountains and desert in between.Mark Reed helped shape the strategy.Reed: “We thought the mountains and the desert were going to be our friends in terms of this strategy. We thought that would deter entry through those places. And that those would be places that we would not

15、have to worry about.”Correspondent：“Because it was so difficult to get through here?”Reed: “So difficult to get through there. Its so long and so expensive, it turned out to be our Achilles heel.”Correspondent: “Because thats exactly where they went?”Reed: “Thats where the smugglers took them.”In th

16、is remote stretch of desert across from New Mexico, we met a smuggler and 11 young men preparing to enter the United States. The men rubbed garlic on their pants and shoes to ward off snakes. Then they crossed a three-foot barbed wire fenceeach one carrying two gallons of waternowhere near enough fo

17、r a journey that could take five or six days. This year, about half a million illegal migrants will come from Mexico to live and work in the US, about twice as many as came before the border was fortified.Reed: “It actually encouraged more people to enter the country because what we did is we took a

18、way the ability of a worker to come into the country and cross back and forth fairly freely. So they started bringing their families in and actually domiciling in the United States with their entire family because they knew they couldnt go back and forth.”More than 20 percent of the deaths n the des

19、ert this year were women and children. The Border Patrol recorded 1.1 million arrests this year, but often its the same people being arrested over and over again. Thats according to T.J. Bonner, who is the head of the Border Patrol agents union.Bonner: “I have caught the same group of people four ti

20、mes in one eight-hour shift.”Correspondent: “Four times in one eight-hour shift.”Bonner: “Four times.”Correspondent: “So you sent them back, they try to come in another way.”Bonner: “When I looked in the record log the next day, their names werent there. So I can only assume that they got by us on t

21、he fifth time.”Fortified fences like this one in Nogales, Arizona, protect only about five percent of the US-Mexican border.Correspondent: “If you look at the total number of illegal migrants coming into the country, do you think the number is more or less since this barrier went up?”Bonner: “Its mo

22、re.”Correspondent: “So, if more people are coming in today than were coming in before the fence went up, then all of the millions of dollars that went into building the thing was a waste of money.”Bonner: “I think thats a fair assessment.”The US government has spent about $20 billion on border contr

23、ol over the past 12 years. But Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo insists the problem is thats just not enough. He is sponsoring a bill that calls for more agents to remove illegal migrants where they work and to vastly increase border security.Rep Tancredo: “If you only put the fence, you know, fo

24、r this five miles of the border, people will go around it, naturally. You have to secure your borders!”Correspondent: “So you would recommend sealing off the entire border, building fences all along the border?”Rep Tancredo: “ Absolutely.”Correspondent: “How much more should we spend?”Tancredo: “Wha

25、tever it takes.”Correspondent: :Billions more.”Rep Tancredo: “Billions more. Ed, why not? It is our job. It is what the federal government should be doing!”The University of Californias Wayne Cornelius, a national authority on immigration, predicted ten years ago that no matter what the government d

26、oes to fortify the border, Mexican workers will still keep coming as long as there are jobs here for them.Cornelius: “ They can earn more in an hour of work in the United States that they could in an entire day in Mexicoif they had a job.”Correspondent: “Its very clear we are telling them not to com

27、e, and it should be very clear to them that if they do come through the desert, they are breaking the law.”Cornelius: “But we are sending them a very mixed message. The message that were sending them is if you can get past the obstacle course at the border, youre essentially home free. You have pret

28、ty much unrestricted access to our labor market and there are employers out there eager for your labor.”Episode 4 About six million illegal migrants are now working in the US. The meatpacking industry is one of the many that rely on illegal immigrant labor. Seven years ago, the Immigration Service c

29、racked down on illegal migrants in plants in Nebraska and Iowa.Mark Reed was in charge of the operation.Reed: “ What we did is we pulled together the meatpacking industry in the states of Nebraska and Iowa and brought them into Washington and told them that we were not going to allow them to hire an

30、y more unauthorized workers. Within 30 days over 3,500 people fled the meatpacking industry in Nebraska.”Correspondent: “So, this was a huge success. I mean you had thousands of illegal immigrants leaving.”Reed: “We proved that the government without doubt had the capacity to deny employment to unau

31、thorized workers.”Correspondent: “What happened next?”Reed: “We were invited to leave Nebraska by the same delegation that invited us in. the bottom line issue was, please leave our state before you ruin our economy.”Correspondent: “You set up a program that results in thousands of illegal workers l

32、eaving.”Reed: “Yes.”Correspondent: “And the government officials that invite you in tell you to stop?”Reed: “The reason for that is that by putting that factory out of business, not only do we put the unauthorized workers out of business, but weve put United States citizens out of business and we de

33、stroy, we have the potential to destroy an entire community.”Correspondent: “The bottom line, though, seems to be that this illegal work force is important to our economy.”Reed: “Absolutely, its essential to our economy.”Correspondent: “So what are the taxpayers getting for the billions and billions

34、 of dollars that have been spent on securing the border?”Reed: “Getting a good story.”Correspondent: “But not a secure border.”Reed: “Do not have a secure border.”Episode 5:The latest attempt to secure the Mexican border is this $14 million pilotless drone, which scans the desert for intruders and p

35、otential terrorists. Fear of terrorism is the latest reason that large bipartisan majorities in Congress have voted to increase the Border Patrols budget.Spokesman: “This represents another step in our nations response to possible terrorists seeking entry into the United States.”Tancredo: “There are

36、 national security implications to porous borders. There really are. I mean, people who are coming into this country and who want to come into this country for very nefarious purposes, not just to come here to work at the 7-11no, theyre coming for other purposes.”Correspondent: “How many terrorists

37、have we caught on the Mexican border?”Cornelius: “Zero.”Correspondent; “Then maybe you could say that building all of these walls and fortifications and having thousands of border agents does work as a deterrent?”Cornelius: “They dont need to come in that way. They can purchase the best forged docum

38、ents in the world. The real danger is that they will come through our legal ports of entry with valid visas, just like the 9.11 terrorists did.”They are now 11,000 Border Patrol agents, three times as many as there were 12 years ago. Only 1000 of them are assigned to find illegal migrants where they

39、 work. Nearly all spend their time making arrests and dropping migrants off on the Mexican side of the border.Reed: “Talk with anybody that may have been arrested out there in the desert. Theyll tell you, number one, Im just coming here to get a job because you have a job to give me and you want me to be here for that job. Im not doing anything really wrong. America wants me.”In the Arizona desert, Border Patrol Agent Neubauer g