英语高级视听-听力原文-Unit-10-Dying-to-get-in.doc

Unit 10 Dying to get inWhen it comes to illegal immigration, the leaders of both parties havent found much to agree on except for one thing. Just about everyone wants to spend billions of dollars to tighten the 2,000 mile U.S.-Mexican border. There is nothing new about this. Since 1993, the U.S. government has tripled the budget for border control, spending a small fortune on fences, high-tech surveillance equipment not to mention thousands of additional border patrol agents. All of this was supposed to make it harder for illegal immigrants to cross over in cities and towns along the border. And it did.But, as correspondent Ed Bradley reported last December, some of the same people who designed that strategy now say its been a huge waste of taxpayers money and that it has done nothing to stop migrants from coming to the U.S. illegally. What it has done, they say, is to force those migrants to cross remote and treacherous stretches of desert, where many are dying.The death toll is so high that the Border Patrol now has a special unit whose only job to help migrants in trouble. During the filming of our 60 Minutes story, Officer Garrett Neubauer received a distress call about 20 miles north of the border in southern Arizona.What we had is a person 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, says Neubauer.The migrant theyre looking for is an 18-year-old Mexican named Abran Gonzales, who has been wandering in the desert for seven days. Agents have narrowed the search area and have found one of his shoes.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 like hes kind of out of it. Hes dehydrated. His condition is going downhill, so hes probably not thinking rationally, says Neubauer.Agent Neubauer has good reason to be concerned. 60 Minutes took a first-hand look at the paths taken by migrants through the desert last summer when temperatures hovered above 100 degrees for weeks at a time. Last year, the Border Patrol reported a record 464 deaths, but by all accounts the number is much higher because of bodies that havent been found. Dr. Bruce Parks, Tucsons Medical Examiner, has been on the job for years and says he has never seen anything like this. There are so many bodies, they wont fit in the vaults in the coroners morgue. When 60 Minutes visited, Dr. Parks had found a place to put an extra 60 bodies, a refrigerated truck that costs his department $1,000 a week. Twelve 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, who was the top immigration official in San Diego. 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 of immigration inspectors if necessary, says Reed.How many would come at one time?Groups of 500 people running up the southbound lanes of I-5, he recalls.The migrants had figured out that if there were enough of them, most of them could get through. The stampedes 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 purchased and they did seal off major cities along the border, but not the mountains and desert in between.Mark Reed helped shape the strategy.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 have to worry about, says Reed. Reed says officials figured the terrain was so difficult it was a deterrent but, he says, it turned out to be our Achilles heel.Thats where the smugglers took them, he explains.In a remote stretch of desert across from New Mexico, 60 Minutes met a smuggler and 11 young men preparing to enter the United States. The men rubbed garlic on their pants to ward off snakes. Then they crossed a three-foot barbed wire fence each one carrying two gallons of water nowhere near enough for a journey that could take five or six days. Last year, about a half million illegal migrants came from Mexico to live and work in the U.S., about twice as many as came before the border was fortified.It actually encouraged more people to enter the country because what we did is we took away 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, says Reed.More than 20 percent of the deaths in the desert last year were women and children. The Border Patrol recorded 1.1 million arrests last year, but often it was the same people being arrested over and over again. I have caught the same group of people four times in one eight-hour shift, says T.J. Bonner, who is the head of the Border Patrol agents union.But Bonner says the immigrants try to come another way after being turned back. When I looked in the record log the next day, their names werent there. So I can only assume that they got by us the fifth time, he says.Fortified fences like the one in Nogales, Arizona, protect only about five percent of the U.S.-Mexican border.Bonner thinks that the number of illegal migrants has actually gone up since the barrier went up. Does he think the millions spent on the fence were a waste of money?I think thats a fair assessment, says Bonner.The U.S. government has spent about $20 billion on border control over the past 12 years. But Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo insists that is just not enough. Hes sponsoring a bill that calls for more agents to remove illegal migrants where they work and to vastly increase border security.If you only put the fence for this five miles of border, people will go around it, naturally. You have to secure your borders! says Rep. Tancredo. He recommends sealing off the entire border, building fences. How much more should the government spend?Whatever it takes, Tancredo says. Billions more. 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 does to fortify the border, Mexican workers will still keep coming as long as there are jobs here for them.They can earn more in an hour of work in the United States than they could in an entire day in Mexico if they had a job, says Cornelius. The government says crossing the border through the desert is breaking the law, but Cornelius says the U.S. is sending 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 pretty much unrestricted access to our labor market and there are employers out there eager for your labor, he says.About six million illegal migrants are now working in the U.S. The meatpacking industry is one of the many that rely on illegal immigrant labor. Seven years ago, the Immigration Service cracked down on illegal migrants in plants in Nebraska and Iowa. Mark Reed was in charge of the operation.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 any more unauthorized workers. Within 30 days over 3,500 people fled the meatpacking industry in Nebraska, says Reed.We proved that the government without doubt had the capacity to deny employment to unauthorized workers, says Reed.What happened next?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, says Reed.The reason 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 destroy, we have the potential to destroy, an entire community, says Reed.Reed says that this illegal work force is essential to our economy.So what are taxpayers getting for the billions of dollars spent on border security?Getting a good story, says Reed. But not a secure border.One recent attempt to secure the Mexican border is a $14 million pilot-less drone, which scans the desert for intruders and potential terrorists. Fear of terrorism is the latest reason that large bipartisan majorities in Congress have voted to increase the Border Patrols budget.There are national security implications to porous borders. There really are. I mean, people are coming into this country who want to come into this country for very nefarious purposes, not just to come here to work at the 7-Eleven, no, theyre coming for other purposes, says Rep. Tancredo.But Cornelius says zero terrorists have been caught on the Mexican border. They dont need to come in that way. They can purchase the best forged documents 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, says Cornelius.There are now 11,000 Border Patrol agents, three times as many as there were 12 years ago. Only 100 of them are assigned to find illegal migrants where they work. Nearly all spend their time making arrests and dropping migrants off on the Mexican side of the border.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 for that job. Im not doing anything really wrong. America wants me, says Reed.Meanwhile, back in the Arizona desert, Border Patrol Agent Neubauer gets word 18-year-old Abran Gonzales, who had been wandering in the desert for seven days, has been found.Abran Gonzales had died of thirst just a few hours earlier.Its hard to know that maybe you could have been out there to help this person, and just werent able. Thats something you have to deal with and move on, says Neubauer.Gonzalez came from a small town in southern Mexico. He had gone to the U.S. to earn enough money to buy a new tin roof for his parents house. The parents had borrowed $300 for Abran to make the trip, money the parents still owe.His cousin, Casimira Manuel, was the first to be told:The man from the consulate called and told me they found Abran in the Arizona desert and he was dead. He was a quiet kid. He never hurt anybody. He just wanted to work and come back home, Casimira recalls.There were 516 bodies discovered in the desert last year - a new record. Including bodies yet to be discovered, the total of migrant deaths is likely to exceed one thousand.