Задание 12. Выполните предпереводческий анализ и полный письменный перевод следующего текста
Turning our backs on immigrants
My mother had pale green eyes. In her youth, she also had a slight figure, beautiful dark hair pulled back in a modest bun and few expectations for her life.
Like most Irish Catholic women, she rarely talked of herself and so I know very little of her history behind the cold, angry glances she often gave. The one thing I do remember her telling me, however, still chills.
I do not recall the context, perhaps, it was during a summer when I was looking for my first paying job as a teenager. The years between her experience and its telling to her fourth child had not taken the bite away from her anger. When she came of age in Columbus, Ohio, during the Great Depression, she said, employers had signs on their doors: HELP WANTED, NO IRISH NEED APPLY.
There is no telling how the anti-Irish bigotry influenced her life and, by implication, mine. Her first-generation father had abandoned the family. My first generation grandmother left my mother and her two brothers to care for themselves while she worked in a factory. It was not until after my mother died that I learned my grandfather's name and the fact that he was an alcoholic.
Bad genes, bad character, bad breaks or bigotry? Who knows. But it is clear to me that such ethnic antagonism creates a heritage of self-loathing that I see in the eyes of my daughters. And job discrimination too often leaves proud men with nothing to offer their families other than their absence.
Now, the hatred and xenophobia that inspired those signs are guiding the creation of public policy on the highest levels. The current Republican Congress has written, and the Democratic president has signed, punitive legislation that institutionalizes anti-immigrant beliefs and punishes the spouses and children of runaway parents.
The reconstruction of federal assistance to the poor - it is not reform - has many flaws. But perhaps the most morally repugnant are those that eliminate all forms of assistance to legal immigrants, even though they have paid taxes.
These are the four major provisions affecting legal immigrants.
Effective immediately, they are no longer eligible for Supplemental Security Income (federal assistance to the elderly and the handicapped). Those who are currently receiving it will be weeded off the rolls throughout the coming year.
They also will be ineligible for food stamps.
In addition, they may also be denied - a state's option - federal cash assistance to single-parent families, as well as Medicaid and social services.
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(Those who lived in the United States for at least10 years are exempted from these three provisions as are refugees, veterans and those granted political asylum.)
Lastly, their sponsor will be considered financially responsible for them, not for up to five years as it is now but until the immigrant becomes a citizen.
I live in New York City now. Half the residents are either immigrants or first generation. The new regulations are predicted to cost the city $290 million during the coming year. California officials, also faced with a large immigrant population, believe that their state will lose about $300 million in federal funds. Illinois, with a city that has historically been the gateway to economic independence for thousands, is likely to be heavily hit too. And no one in authority is talking about how these cuts will affect the underground, all-cash economy.
The economic havoc, however, is but one measure of how these changes will affect our urban communities, filled to the brim as they are with people from around the world.
If the predicted devastation materializes, it will be extremely sad. But the violence done to our national character will be equally harmful. We will have entered another shameful period in our history caused by our elected officials deciding to turn their backs on the pledge our nation made to the world (Remember: "Give us your tired, your weak.") and, instead, to become scions of those who put up the signs that hurt my mother so.
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