新视野大学英语读写教程听力 第二册 unit9a_new

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[00:00.00]喜欢hxen.net，就把hxen.net复制到QQ个人资料中！Stop the Brain Drain
[00:03.89]A bill now before Congress would give preferential treatment
[00:10.44]to foreign students with advanced degrees in science and engineering
[00:16.88]who want to work in the United States.
[00:21.53]To those of us who are immigrants,
[00:25.78]the bill seems simply to sanction a policy secretly implemented by U.S. industry
[00:33.52]for nearly four decades—namely,stealing brains from the third world
[00:40.68]In general,
[00:43.52]the "21st Century Technology Resources and Commercial Leadership Act",
[00:50.69]which Sen. John McCain brought to the Senate in late 1999,
[00:57.46]is designed to keep the U.S. high-tech industry
[01:03.00]on top by filling the need for skilled technology workers.
[01:09.37]One provision of the bill states that, among non-immigrant visa applicants
[01:16.75]the state should give preference to foreign nationals
[01:22.12]with secondary degrees in math, science, engineering or technology.
[01:29.78]such provision will provide temporary skilled personnel in those fields
[01:37.13]During the 1960s and 1970s, politicians in my native country
[01:45.30]India, used to wave the slogan "Stop the Brain Drain"
[01:51.56]a reference to the fact that the cream of India
[01:56.32]was leaving for the lucrative shores of England and America.
[02:02.26]In that post-independence era,
[02:07.01]when everything foreign was considered contaminated by colonialism,
[02:13.45]we talked of cottage industries and economic imperialism.
[02:19.61]We threw Coca-Cola out and invented "Thumbs Up Cola";
[02:25.76]But it was also the era of Sputnik,
[02:30.62]of nuclear power and the green revolution.
[02:35.77]Every year, on Independence Day,
[02:40.13]our Prime Minister Nehru spoke of the benefits of science and technology.
[02:47.69]Our institutes of technology, built with European and American aid,
[02:54.85]offered students free room and board, even salary.
[03:00.40]Indian taxpayers footed the bill
[03:04.64]in the hope that one day the graduates would help reconstruct the nation
[03:11.30]I was one such student.
[03:15.37]But studying my textbooks late at night
[03:20.12]in the library of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT),
[03:26.68]I would dream, not of India, but of America, the land of opportunity
[03:33.41]Many students like me, indeed,
[03:37.94]left during those years, never to return.
[03:42.88]So our government set up special programs to tempt foreign graduates
[03:49.72]Our leaders saw parallels to the independence movement
[03:55.19]founded by people like Nehru and Gandhi who,
[04:00.77]after absorbing Western political thought at institutions like Eton and Oxford
[04:08.72]returned home to serve their native land.
[04:13.69]But few foreign graduates came home to "pay their pledge";
[04:20.14]as Nehru had put it.
[04:23.48]Our leaders had failed to see that the emphasis on symbol manipulation
[04:30.04]at IIT left little room for social thought
[04:35.90]and much scope for the greedy outcomes of capital-driven business.
[04:42.35]Over the next two decades, IIT graduates
[04:47.60]educated at the expense of Indian taxpayers
[04:52.86]played a major role in founding California's Silicon Valley.
[04:58.73]The personal computer revolution and the invention of the Internet
[05:04.49]made the demand for skilled labor mushroom to such tremendous proportions
[05:11.98]that even if every American child were to study nothing but science
[05:18.35]from now on,
[05:21.41]we would be unable to keep pace with demand in the decades to come.
[05:27.35]In other words, the legislation would benefit not immigrants,
[05:34.01]but American industry which would be crippled without it.
[05:40.67]In India in the meantime, the entire education system has shifted gears
[05:48.44]to feed the appetite of the American computer industry.
[05:54.38]As IIT cannot graduate enough students to fill these needs,
[06:01.12]every street corner now sports billboards for private academies
[06:08.17]offering certificates in computer programming.