203考研英语阅读真题考研英语第2篇毙考题.pdf

2013 考研英语阅读真题：考研英语（二）第 2 篇 A century ago, the immigrants from across the Atlantic inclued settlers and sojourners. Along with the many folks looking to make a permanent home in the United States came those who had no intention to stay, and who would make some money and then go home. Between 1908 and 1915, about 7 millin people arrived while about 2 million departed. About a quarter of all Italian immigrants, for exanmle, eventually returned to Italy for good. They even had an affectionate nickn ame, “uccelli di passaggio, ” birds of passage. Today, we are much more rigid about immigrants. We divide nemcomers into two categories: legal or illegal, good or bad. We hail them as Americans in the making, or brand them as aliens fit for deportation. That framework has contributed mightily to our broken immigrantion system and the long political paralysis over how to fix it. Wedon’t need more categories, but we need to change the way we think about categories. We need to look beyond strick definitions of legal and illegal. To start, we can recognize the new birds of passage, those living and thriving in the gray areas. We might then begin to solve our immigration challenges. Crop pickers, violinists, construction workers, entrepreneurs, engineers, homehealth- care aides and physicists are amongtoday ’s birds of passage. They are energetic participants in a global economy driven by the flow of work, money and ideas. They prefer to come and go as opportunity calls them. They can manage to have a job in one place and a family in another. With or without permission, they straddle laws, jurisdictions and identities with ease. We need them to imagine the United States as a place where they can be productive