搜索关注在线英语听力室公众号:tingroom,领取免费英语资料大礼包。
(单词翻译)
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
More and more businesses are being raided as the Trump1 administration goes after employers who knowingly hire unauthorized immigrants. The biggest bust2 of all targeted a trailer manufacturer in northeast Texas. Immigration police hauled off more than 150 workers from the plant. As NPR's John Burnett reports, the raids have employers howling that the immigration crackdown is undermining another administration priority of boosting manufacturing in America.
(SOUNDBITE OF WELDING METAL)
JOHN BURNETT, BYLINE3: The sounds of raw steel being turned into trailers. It's brutish labor4. Cut the metal, hammer it into place, arc weld it, repeat. Business was booming here at the Load Trail plant northeast of Dallas. Their heavy black trailers are popular for hauling hay bales, topsoil and oilfield equipment. Then came the raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in late August.
Jake Thiessen, whose family founded this plant, takes me onto the production floor, and I ask him why it's half empty.
JAKE THIESSEN: Well, there should be a lot more welding going on on this floor right now. It's very slow now.
BURNETT: I hear your production is down, like, 40 percent.
THIESSEN: Yeah.
BURNETT: Over in company headquarters, Load Trail CEO Kevin Hiebert remembers the morning of August 28, when a helicopter thumped5 overhead and 300 ICE agents swarmed6 into his yard.
KEVIN HIEBERT: It looked like something that you typically would see out of the movies, not something you ever plan on living out in (laughter) real life.
BURNETT: ICE rounded up nearly a quarter of Hiebert's workforce7, loaded them into buses and booked them for working in the country unlawfully. A criminal investigation8 of the company continues. So far this year, ICE agents have stormed 7-Elevens, a meatpacking plant, dairy and vegetable farms, and a feedlot. Katrina Berger, Chief Homeland Security Investigator9 in the Dallas office, read a statement to reporters after the Load Trail raid.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
KATRINA BERGER: Businesses that knowingly hire illegal aliens create an unfair advantage over the competing businesses. In addition, they take jobs away from U.S. citizens and legal residents.
BURNETT: But you won't hear that complaint in Tigertown. This flyspeck10 community amid cotton fields near the Oklahoma border is home to a half-dozen major trailer manufacturers, all competitors.
Does the American trailer industry depend on undocumented labor?
HIEBERT: I can make a broader statement. I think the manufacturing industry in Texas, any kind of steel fabrication, construction, depends on immigrant labor, illegal immigrant labor.
BURNETT: That's what Hiebert thinks, and he's not alone. The vice11 president of a competing trailer maker12 down the road agrees. He says they all depend on illegal labor. He asked not to be named in hopes of staying off ICE's radar13. But it's too late for that. ICE is currently auditing14 employee records of every trailer manufacturer out here to find out which workers have fake identity documents. Some unauthorized employees are so rattled15, they're not showing up for work. Kevin Hiebert says what his industry needs are legal guest workers.
HIEBERT: Especially now that they're cranking up on the enforcement, everybody hopes that there will be some kind of a real immigration reform before what happens at Load Trail happens to them.
BURNETT: Load Trail has been in trouble before. In 2014, the company was fined $445,000 for employing more than 170 unauthorized immigrants at its plant. Hiebert says they hire who walks in the door, and they pay decent wages - $20 to $25 an hour. Still, they've always had a hard time finding welders17. So the work is done by men like Ignacio Barrios. He's a sturdy, 36-year-old welder16 who came here illegally from Oaxaca, Mexico. He wears an American flag T-shirt and sits in the church that's helping18 to support his family of five now that he's out of work. Barrios paid a $5,000 bond to get out of detention19. Now he's waiting for his day in immigration court.
IGNACIO BARRIOS: (Through interpreter) You have to work hard. Lots of times, you get injured, burned. You break your fingers. It gets over a hundred degrees in there. I've seen that Americans don't want to do the kind of work that we do.
BURNETT: Lamar County, where the ICE raid went down, is crimson20 Trump country. Yet, to hear the trailer bosses tell it, the administration's aggressive immigration enforcement now threatens one of the county's lifebloods. I took this conundrum21 to the old boys down at the Dairy Queen in the county seat of Paris. They meet every morning to solve the world's problems.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Just coffee this morning?
BURNETT: Here's Alan Helberg, a former hospital administrator22.
ALAN HELBERG: This country will not survive if we don't straighten the way they can come over here and work - because I guarantee you the Americans are not going to do that.
BURNETT: And his buddy23, Jerry Akers, a retired24 dentist.
JERRY AKERS: The Congress of the United States needs to get off their duff and pass some meaningful legislation where people come here and work legally and not have to be afraid of getting uprooted25.
BURNETT: Immigration reform is so far dead in the water in the gridlocked Congress, and back at Tigertown, the trailer makers26 say if they can't find enough welders, they would consider moving their whole operations to Mexico. John Burnett, NPR News, Tigertown, Texas.
1 trump | |
n.王牌,法宝;v.打出王牌,吹喇叭 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
2 bust | |
vt.打破;vi.爆裂;n.半身像;胸部 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
3 byline | |
n.署名;v.署名 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
4 labor | |
n.劳动,努力,工作,劳工;分娩;vi.劳动,努力,苦干;vt.详细分析;麻烦 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
5 thumped | |
v.重击, (指心脏)急速跳动( thump的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
参考例句: |
|
|
6 swarmed | |
密集( swarm的过去式和过去分词 ); 云集; 成群地移动; 蜜蜂或其他飞行昆虫成群地飞来飞去 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
7 workforce | |
n.劳动大军,劳动力 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
8 investigation | |
n.调查,调查研究 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
9 investigator | |
n.研究者,调查者,审查者 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
10 flyspeck | |
n.蝇粪留下的污点, 污点;v.弄脏 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
11 vice | |
n.坏事;恶习;[pl.]台钳,老虎钳;adj.副的 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
12 maker | |
n.制造者,制造商 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
13 radar | |
n.雷达,无线电探测器 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
14 auditing | |
n.审计,查账,决算 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
15 rattled | |
慌乱的,恼火的 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
16 welder | |
n电焊工 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
17 welders | |
n.焊接工( welder的名词复数 ) | |
参考例句: |
|
|
18 helping | |
n.食物的一份&adj.帮助人的,辅助的 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
19 detention | |
n.滞留,停留;拘留,扣留;(教育)留下 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
20 crimson | |
n./adj.深(绯)红色(的);vi.脸变绯红色 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
21 conundrum | |
n.谜语;难题 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
22 administrator | |
n.经营管理者,行政官员 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
23 buddy | |
n.(美口)密友,伙伴 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
24 retired | |
adj.隐退的,退休的,退役的 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
25 uprooted | |
v.把(某物)连根拔起( uproot的过去式和过去分词 );根除;赶走;把…赶出家园 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
26 makers | |
n.制造者,制造商(maker的复数形式) | |
参考例句: |
|
|
本文本内容来源于互联网抓取和网友提交,仅供参考,部分栏目没有内容,如果您有更合适的内容,欢迎 点击提交 分享给大家。