Department of Sociology, UCLA

In this study, we examine the Vietnamese population of the United States as a case study in the integration of a refugee group. We first offer a brief review of Vietnamese refugee resettlement in the US and the making of a new ethnic community. We then provide a quantitative analysis of socioeconomic mobility among Vietnamese refugees using American Community Survey data from 1980 to 2015 and other national-level data. We examine how this ethnic population has changed over time by focusing on key socioeconomic indicators, such as levels of education, occupation, and income, as well as poverty rates. Third, we seek to explain what enables Vietnamese refugees and their children to overcome initial disadvantage and move up in society based on our own work over the span of 20 years with qualitative data. We consider how policies, institutions (government, civil society, and ethnic), and patterns of social relations in the Vietnamese American community have interacted with individual agency to shape mobility.

California made history on September 23, 2002, when the nation’s first comprehensive paid family leave program was signed into law by former governor Gray Davis. Benefits provided by this pioneering legislation became available to most working Californians starting on July 1, 2004. The new law provides up to six weeks of partial pay – 55% of weekly earnings up to a maximum of $728 per week – for eligible employees who need time off from work to bond with a new child or to care for a seriously ill family member. The program, funded entirely by a payroll tax on employees, builds on California’s existing State Disability Insurance (SDI) system, which for many years has provided income support for employees’ medical and pregnancy-related leaves. Like SDI, the new paid family leave program is extensive (although not universal) in coverage: apart from some selfemployed persons, virtually all private sector employees are included.1 California’s new law is especially valuable for the growing numbers of low-wage workers, many of them female, who currently have limited access to employer-sponsored fringe benefits providing paid time off (such as paid sick leave and paid vacation). Until July 1, 2004, such benefits were the main sources of income support for employees who took leaves from work to bond with a new child or to provide care for a seriously ill family member.

After briefly reviewing the various developments contributing to the recent growth in demand for time off from work as well as the political processes that led to the passage of California’s pioneering paid family leave legislation, this chapter analyzes new data on paid family leave from two recent state-level surveys—the fall 2003 Golden Bear Omnibus (GBO) survey of California adults and the 2003 Survey of California Establishments (SCE) of employers.2 Although California adults responding to the GBO survey expressed overwhelming support for the idea of paid family leave, their awareness of the new law was surprisingly limited, with only about one in five respondents indicating that they were familiar with it. Awareness of the new law was especially low among the groups that are least likely to have access to employer-sponsored paid time off: women, low-wage workers,immigrants, and disadvantaged racial-ethnic groups. Ironically, these same groups expressed disproportionately favorable attitudes toward the idea of paid leave.

The survey data also provide insight into the ways in which, prior to the implementation of the new law, employers and employees in the state handled the kinds of events that the paid family leave program now covers. Many employed Californians have taken family leaves in the past, the GBO data show. And the data from the SCE survey reveal that many employers in the state—especially those that are unionized, those with large numbers of employees, and those with a relatively large proportion of professional, managerial, and technical employees—already provided family and medical leave benefits beyond those required by law before the establishment of the new paid family leave program. The recent extension of such benefits to the much larger population covered by the legislation passed in 2002 could be its most far-reaching effect; realizing that potential, however, will require increasing public awareness of the law substantially.

We study quasiperiodicity-induced localization of waves in strongly precompressed granular chains. We propose three different set-ups, inspired by the Aubry-André (AA) model, of quasiperiodic chains; and we use these models to compare the effects of on-site and off-site quasiperiodicity in nonlinear lattices. When there is purely on-site quasiperiodicity, which we implement in two different ways, we show for a chain of spherical particles that there is a localization transition (as in the original AA model). However, we observe no localization transition in a chain of cylindrical particles in which we incorporate quasiperiodicity in the distribution of contact angles between adjacent cylinders by making the angle periodicity incommensurate with that of the chain. For each of our three models, we compute the Hofstadter spectrum and the associated Minkowski-Bouligand fractal dimension, and we demonstrate that the fractal dimension decreases as one approaches the localization transition (when it exists). We also show, using the chain of cylinders as an example, how to recover the Hofstadter spectrum from the system dynamics. Finally, in a suite of numerical computations, we demonstrate localization and also that there exist regimes of ballistic, superdiffusive, diffusive and subdiffusive transport. Our models provide a flexible set of systems to study quasiperiodicity-induced analogues of Anderson phenomena in granular chains that one can tune controllably from weakly to strongly nonlinear regimes.This article is part of the theme issue 'Nonlinear energy transfer in dynamical and acoustical systems'.