A life's ambition: to cross the border - PAU inglés Andalucía 2006

>Exámenes selectividad inglés resueltos Andalucía

Picture by John Steven Fernandez - CC licence

Until recently the main news about immigration in this part of the world focused on the boatloads of Africans attempting to reach the shores of southern Spain. Lately, however, a new phenomenon has hit the headlines: immigrants have been storming the borders between Morocco and the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla massively.

The double three-metre-high barbed-wire fences that divide Spanish and Moroccan territories have not put them off. Hundreds or even thousands of sub-Saharan Africans camp out in the woods near the border. They choose their place and moment carefully according to the position of the Spanish and Moroccan guards, and use their handmade ladders to scale the fences always after dark. If several hundreds attempt to get across, at least a few are bound to succeed.

“These men and women can go nowhere else because they have nothing to eat; they have no job and many have no family left. That’s why they are going to try it again and again,” says the president of a non-profit organization that tries to provide aid for these immigrants. Meanwhile, the centres that run as temporary shelters for homeless immigrants are more than overflowing.

  KEY A LIFE AMBITION

COMPREHENSION

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