雅思阅读 121: The Long Arrival of the Newcomers（新来者的漫长抵达）

改编自 UNHCR / World Bank / ReliefWeb（2025-2026）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://reliefweb.int/report/jordan/fragile-yet-unmistakable-long-term-integration-syrian-refugees-jordan

Reading Passage

A. When people flee a war, the world's first instinct is a humanitarian one: food, tents, a temporary camp, a hope that the crisis will soon end. But the lesson of the last two decades is that crises rarely end on schedule. Syrian families who crossed into Jordan expecting to go home after six years are still there more than a decade later. Venezuelans who walked to Colombia are now raising children whose schooling began abroad. Ukrainians who fled west in 2022 are, by 2026, weighing whether to rebuild their lives in Lithuania or Latvia rather than return. What began as emergency relief has become, without anyone quite voting for it, a long-term question of integration: how millions of displaced people become, over years, working, tax-paying, neighbourly members of the societies that took them in. The numbers are no longer marginal. By 2023, Colombia had granted legal status to more than a million and a half Venezuelan refugees; Lithuania hosted more than fifty thousand Ukrainians under temporary protection. Across the rich world and its poorer neighbours alike, the question has shifted from whether refugees will leave to how they will live beside the people who received them.

B. Integration, the surveys show, is not a moment but a curve — and a bumpy one. In Latvia, among working-age Ukrainian refugees, employment rose from fifty-six per cent in 2024 to sixty-two per cent the following year, a clear gain yet still short of the native workforce. In Lithuania, social cohesion and inclusion improved, and more refugees said they planned to stay long-term, but employment and school enrolment stayed stubbornly flat. The pattern repeats: trust and belonging build faster than jobs and qualifications. Secure housing, language classes and a work permit turn out to be the levers that move the numbers; without them, even sympathetic host societies find the curve flattening. In Britain, official tracking of newly resettled refugees found that only a year after arrival, a bare four per cent were employed — most of them part-time — while more than half were still looking for work. The early years, the data say plainly, are hard. Even the volunteering that many take up is not idleness: it is a way to learn the language, the workplace and the local economy while waiting for a job that matches their skills.

C. The children tell the story most clearly, because integration for them is not a policy but a daily experience. In Jordan, about half of all refugees are children, and although public schools opened their doors to Syrian pupils, enrolment did not keep up. By 2023, the number of Syrian children in school had fallen to around a hundred and seventy thousand, driven down by poverty, the pressure on teenagers to earn, and academic gaps left by years of interrupted education. Boys, in particular, dropped out at secondary level. The danger is the familiar one: a generation that arrives school-age but leaves without qualifications becomes, a decade later, a group locked out of work — which is why host governments and aid agencies now focus so heavily on keeping refugee children in secondary and higher education rather than merely registering them. The contrast with success stories is instructive: where language support and graduation credentials are guaranteed, children catch up; where they are absent, the gaps harden into permanent disadvantage, and the next generation pays for the shortfall of the first.

D. Legal status turns out to matter more than almost any cultural programme. Colombia's temporary protection programme, which by 2023 had regularised over a million and a half Venezuelans, gave them work permits, access to basic education and emergency healthcare. Research published in 2024 found that the scheme improved refugees' labour-market outcomes, incomes and consumption — evidence that a piece of paper granting legality, not charity, is what unlocks the host economy. The World Bank has since distilled the lesson into three priorities: open the door to work and to national systems of education, health and social protection; target limited budgets where they count most; and spread the burden across many donor countries rather than leaving a few frontline states to carry it alone. Humanitarian aid, in this view, remains essential but no longer sufficient; the future of refugee policy lies in weaving newcomers into the national fabric, not parking them in camps. A refugee who can work, whose child can graduate and whose home is secure stops being a "crisis" and starts being a neighbour.

E. Yet the political clock keeps running against the long view. In Europe, the temporary protection that Ukrainians enjoy is scheduled to begin winding down after March 2027, leaving hundreds of thousands of people to choose between a permanent residency they have not yet earned and a return home that may no longer exist. Public opinion in host countries sways with the price of housing and the strength of the economy, and the welcome that is generous at a moment of moral clarity can fray when budgets tighten. Integration, in the end, is neither purely a matter of refugee effort nor of host goodwill. It is a slow arithmetic: jobs created, classrooms kept open, work permits granted, children allowed to graduate — repeated, year after year, with no dramatic breakthrough and no moment at which anyone can declare it finished. The newcomers do not arrive into integration. They arrive into a waiting room, and the journey from there into ordinary life is measured not in weeks but in children who grow up bilingual and adults who, slowly, become neighbours. The host society, in turn, is changed too: it learns new dishes, new words, and the uncomfortable truth that its own citizens were once newcomers somewhere else.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. Integration as a bumpy curve, not a moment ii. Why children are the clearest test iii. The power of a legal piece of paper iv. A political clock running against the long view v. The cost of tents and blankets vi. Why refugees never want to work vii. The history of temporary protection

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. How did Latvian refugee employment change between 2024 and 2025? A. It fell from 62% to 56%. B. It rose from 56% to 62%. C. It stayed at exactly 50%. D. It reached 100%.

6. What happened to Syrian children's school enrolment in Jordan by 2023? A. It rose to four hundred thousand. B. It fell to around a hundred and seventy thousand. C. It stayed unchanged. D. It was abolished entirely.

7. Why did Colombia's temporary protection programme matter? A. It gave refugees work permits and access to basic services, improving their incomes. B. It sent refugees home. C. It built new camps in the desert. D. It charged refugees for healthcare.

8. What is scheduled to happen to European temporary protection after March 2027? A. It will be expanded indefinitely. B. It is scheduled to begin winding down. C. It will become permanent law. D. It will pay refugees a salary.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. By 2023, Colombia had granted legal status to more than a million and a half Venezuelan refugees.
10. In Britain, about a year after arrival, a majority of resettled refugees were already in full-time work.
11. In Jordan, boys were particularly likely to drop out at secondary level.
12. Secure housing, language classes and a work permit help move integration numbers.
13. Refugees in Europe all chose to return home in 2022.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

The World Bank's three priorities are to open the door to work and national systems of education, health and social (14) __________, to target limited budgets, and to spread the burden across many donor (15) __________.

答案与解析

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