The McCarran-Walter Act:A Contradictory Legacy on Race, Quotas, and Ideology

The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 ended the blanket exclusion of immigrants based on race and created the foundation for current immigration law, but imposed a racialized immigration quota system and new ideological grounds for exclusion

Reverse and dual Loomis-Whitney-type inequalities

Various results are proved giving lower bounds for the $m$th intrinsic volume $V_m(K)$, $m=1,\dots,n-1$, of a compact convex set $K$ in ${\mathbb{R}}^n$, in terms of the $m$th intrinsic volumes of its projections on the coordinate hyperplanes (or its intersections with the coordinate hyperplanes). The bounds are sharp when $m=1$ and $m=n-1$. These are reverse (or dual, respectively) forms of the Loomis-Whitney inequality and versions of it that apply to intrinsic volumes. For the intrinsic volume $V_1(K)$, which corresponds to mean width, the inequality obtained confirms a conjecture of Betke and McMullen made in 1983

"Eating Bitterness": The Impact of Asian-Pacific Migration on U.S. Immigration Policy

Asian-Pacific migration to the United States has had a positive impact on immigration and refugee law by contributing to the demise of exclusion acts against non-whites and of the nationality-based quota system

Remembering December 17: Repeal of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act

December 17 marks the anniversary of the 1943 repeal by Congress of the Chinese Exclusion Act of May 6, 1882. With only a few exceptions, this law barred any Chinese from immigrating to the United States, and was the first time U.S. immigration policy singled out citizens of a particular nation for wholesale discrimination

Closed Borders and Mass Deportations: The Lessons of the Barred Zone Act

In 2005 Congress is expected to reexamine the U.S. immigration system in light of the roughly 10 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the country. Some advocates of restrictionist immigration policies offer mass deportations or a "moratorium" on immigration as solutions to the obviously dysfunctional system under which undocumented migration of this scale is taking place. Yet U.S. immigration history offers examples of similarly ill-conceived proposals. As policymakers and the public debate the nature and extent of immigration reform, they would do well to reflect upon the cautionary lessons of the Barred Zone Act of February 4, 1917

Liquid-Gas Phase Transition in Nuclear Equation of State

A canonical ensemble model is used to describe a caloric curve of nuclear liquid-gas phase transition. Allowing a discontinuity in the freeze out density from one spinodal density to another for a given initial temperature, the nuclear liquid-gas phase transition can be described as first order. Averaging over various freeze out densities of all the possible initial temperatures for a given total reaction energy, the first order characteristics of liquid-gas phase transition is smeared out to a smooth transition. Two experiments, one at low beam energy and one at high beam energy show different caloric behaviors and are discussed.Comment: 12 pages in Revtex including two Postscript figure

Effect of moir\'e superlattice reconstruction in the electronic excitation spectrum of graphene-metal heterostructures

We have studied the electronic excitation spectrum in periodically rippled graphene on Ru(0001) and flat, commensurate graphene on Ni(111) by means of high-resolution electron energy loss spectroscopy and a combination of density functional theory and tight-binding approaches. We show that the periodic moir\'e superlattice originated by the lattice mismatch in graphene/Ru(0001) induces the emergence of an extra mode, which is not present in graphene/Ni(111). Contrary to the ordinary intra-band plasmon of doped graphene, the extra mode is robust in charge-neutral graphene/metal contacts, having its origin in electron-hole inter-band transitions between van Hove singularities that emerge in the reconstructed band structure, due to the moir\'e pattern superlattice.Comment: Supplemental materials available at http://www.theorphys.science.ru.nl/people/yuan

Lattice Simulation of Nuclear Multifragmentation

Motivated by the decade-long debate over the issue of criticality supposedly observed in nuclear multifragmentation, we propose a dynamical lattice model to simulate the phenomenon. Its Ising Hamiltonian mimics a short range attractive interaction which competes with a thermal-like dissipative process. The results here presented, generated through an event-by-event analysis, are in agreement with both experiment and those produced by a percolative (non-dynamical) model.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure

Intersections of Dilatates of Convex Bodies

We initiate a systematic investigation into the nature of the function ∝K(L,ρ) that gives the volume of the intersection of one convex body K in Rn and a dilatate ρL of another convex body L in Rn, as well as the function ηK(L, ρ) that gives the (n - 1)-dimensional Hausdorff measure of the intersection of K and the boundary ∂(ρ L) of ρL. The focus is on the concavity properties of αK (L, ρ). Of particular interest is the case when K and L are symmetric with respect to the origin. In this situation, there is an interesting change in the concavity properties of αK (L, ρ) between dimension 2 and dimensions 3 or higher. When L is the unit ball, an important special case with connections to E. Lutwak\u27s dual Brunn-Minkowski theory, we prove that this change occurs between dimension 2 and dimensions 4 or higher, and conjecture that it occurs between dimension 3 and dimension 4. We also establish an isoperimetric inequality with equality condition for subsets of equatorial zones in the sphere S2, and apply this and the Brunn-Minkowski inequality in the sphere to obtain results related to this conjecture, as well as to the properties of a new type of symmetral of a convex body, which we call the equatorial symmetral