听力-chapter .docVIP

Chapter 2 Immigration: Past and Present = 1 \* ROMAN I. PRELISTENING Vocabulary and Key Concepts Throughout history, people have moved, or immigrated, to new countries to live. Natural disasters can take many forms：those that are characterized by a shortage of rain or food are called droughts and famines respectively. Sometimes people immigrate to a new country to escape political or religious persecution. Rather than immigrants, the early settlers from Great Britain considered themselves colonists; they had left home to settle new land for the mother country. The So-called Great Immigration, which can be divided into three stages, or time periods, began about l830 and lasted till about 1930. The Industrial Revolution, which began in the eighteenth century, caused widespread unemployment as machines replaced workers. The scarcity of farmland in Europe caused many people to immigrate to the United States, where farmland was more abundant. Land in the United States was plentiful and available when the country was expanding westward. In fact, the U.S. government offered free public land to citizens in 1862. The failure of the Irish potato crop in the middle of the nineteenth century caused widespread starvation. The Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II contributed to the noticeable decrease in immigration after 1930. The first law that limited the number of immigrants coming from a certain part of the world was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. It is important to note that in 1965 strict quotas based on nationality were eliminated. At the end of the 1940s immigration began to increase again and has, in general, risen steadily since then. Will the trend continue for non-Europeans to immigrate to the United States? The U.S. immigration laws of today in general require that new immigrants have the skills necessary to succeed in the United States because industry no longer requires large numbers of unskilled workers. D. Notetaking Preparation