Word: central
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Brownsville, Texas. Weary yet hopeful, their bodies battered but their spirits high, the families while away the hours at the Casa Romero shelter for Central American refugees. They line up for a lunch of rice and beans, served from steaming kettles; they mop the floors and shoot pool; they practice English phrases; and they wait. And wait...
...emergency springs primarily from Central America. Since last June, 30,000 Nicaraguans fleeing war and economic misery have flocked to the U.S. That number could be dwarfed by the tens of thousands expected to arrive in the U.S. in 1989. As a result of Moscow's liberalized emigration policies, some 50,000 Soviet citizens, primarily Jews and Armenians, will be allowed to leave the U.S.S.R. this year; most will be headed for the U.S. Several thousand of the 5 million Afghanistan refugees camped in Pakistan will also emigrate...
...plight of the Central American refugees remains far more acute. Recent court decisions have held that applicants for asylum have to be given work- authorization documents, allowing them to seek immediate employment while the INS scrutinizes their pleas. But to stem a surge of arrivals from Central America, the INS delayed granting work permits until asylum applications could be processed and told the refugees to remain near their point of entry until the paperwork was completed. The new regulations helped turn the Rio Grande Valley into a giant alien way station...
Sound farfetched? Perhaps. But normally unflappable Bostonians consider this apocalyptic vision a real possibility, and it has the city in an uproar. In two years construction is scheduled to begin on the $4.4 billion Central Artery project, the rebuilding of a highway that runs through the heart of downtown Boston. To relocate much of the highway underground, workers will have to excavate 13 million sq. yds. of earth, tearing up countless sewers and other subterranean tunnels. The problem: they are home to untold thousands of the city's rats, one of the largest such colonies in the country. Rudely evicted...
That prospect deeply alarms Bostonians, who think the city already has a big enough rat problem. The rodents roam around Chinatown, and were recently spotted in city hall for the first time in memory. Says Mark Iapicca, who runs a parking lot beneath the elevated Central Artery: "There are already more rats than people around here, and they're bigger than my dog. They're underground now, but what happens when they go aboveground...