Text 2 A century ago,the immigrants from across the Atlantic included 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 7million people arrived while about 2 million departed.About a quarter of all Italian immigrants,for example,eventually returned to Italy for good.They even had an affectionate nickname,“uccelli di passaggio,”birds of passage.Today,we are much more rigid about immigrants.We divide newcomers into two categories:legal or illegal,good or bad.We hail them as Americans in the making,or brand them as aliens to be kicked out.That framework has contributed mightily to our broken immigration system and the long political paralysis over how to fix it.We don't need more categories,but we need to change the way we think about categories.We need to look beyond strict 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,home healthcare aides and physicists are among today'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 for a while without committing themselves to staying forever.We need them to feel that home can be both here and there and that they can belong to two nations honorably.Accommodating this new world of people in motion will require new attitudes on both sides of the immigration battle.Looking beyond the culture war logic of right or wrong means opening up the middle ground and understanding that managing immigration today requires multiple paths and multiple outcomes,including some that are not easy to accomplish legally in the existing system.
“Birds of passage”refers to those who____
含义题【命题思路】词义句意题大体可分为两类：一、超纲词的意思判断；二、熟词生义、短语或句子在语境中的理解。第一类可通过词根词缀法和上下文语境解题；第二类则主要通过上下文语境来判断。上下文语境包括：一、冒号、破折号后的内容、同位语、同位语从句或定语从句的内容；二、语境表达的主要含义。切忌脱离文章语境来解题。【直击答案】根据题干关键词Birds of passage，定位到第一段末句They even had an affectionate nickname,“uccelli di passaggio，”birds of passage.这句话中birds of passage就是对“uccelli di passaggio”的解释说明，而“uccelli di passaggio，”是nickname的同位语，因此birds of passage是对they的解释说明。通过上下文可知，they指代the immigrants（移民）。因此，birds of passage就是移民的别称。故C项为正确答案。【排除干扰】A项为第一段第一句话的断章取义理解，而通过后文判断，they不仅仅包括来自大西洋的移民，还包括其他国家的移民，因此A项错误。第二句指出他们中的相当大一部分并没有永远待在异国，而是会回国，因此B项不对。D项是对第二句断章取义的理解。
