Professors Johnson, Aldana, Saucedo to Release 4th Edition of 'Understanding Immigration Law'

In December, Carolina Academic Press will publish the fourth edition of Understanding Immigration Law, co-authored by UC Davis Law Professors Kevin R. Johnson, Raquel E. Aldana and Leticia M. Saucedo alongside University of San Francisco School of Law Associate Dean and UC Davis Law Professor Emeritus Bill Ong Hing and University of Louisville Professor of Law Enid Trucios-Haynes.

According to its publisher, the fourth edition “lays out the basics of U.S. immigration law in an accessible way to newcomers to the field. It offers background about the intellectual, historical, and constitutional foundations of U.S. immigration law. The book also identifies the factors that have historically fueled migration to the United States, including the economic ‘pull’ of jobs and family in the U.S. and the ‘push’ of economic hardship, political instability, and other facets of life in the sending country.”

Carolina Academic Press also notes that “each chapter has been updated to analyze the unprecedented number of immigration enforcement measures—and many simply unprecedented measures—taken by the Trump administration in his second term.”

Raquel E. Aldana joined UC Davis in 2017 to serve as the inaugural Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Diversity and returned to full-time law teaching in 2020. Aldana’s research has focused on transitional justice, criminal justice reforms and sustainable development in Latin America, as well as immigrant rights. She has authored or edited five books and published over 30 law review articles or book chapters. She is a graduate of Arizona State University and Harvard Law School.

Kevin R. Johnson is a distinguished professor of law, Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law. Johnson is the director of the Aoki Center for Critical Race and Nation Studies and also has an appointment as professor of Chicana/o studies at UC Davis. He served as dean of UC Davis Law from 2008 to 2024. Johnson is an internationally recognized scholar in the fields of immigration law and policy, refugee law and civil rights.

Leticia Saucedo, a professor of law at UC Davis School of Law, is an expert in employment, labor, and immigration law and the co-director of the UC Davis Labor and Community Center of the Greater Capital Region.