Although many voices call our contemporary moment “unprecedented,” migration historians can actually account for what is new, and what is not new, about the anti-migrant rhetoric and policy currently ascendant across the world. Students concerned about migrants’ rights enroll in our classes seeking knowledge about the past while also asking understandable questions about what is coming next. Faculty and students have varied personal connections to migration history. For some of us, the past we study together illuminates our own family’s history, and the future we are worried about is the fate of close kin, or themselves. With such high stakes for our inquiry, our classes feature papers, exams, presentations, and other more quotidian practices of scholarly environments. How can we make historical knowledge about past migration usable to fight for migrants’ rights in our own moment, and to prepare our students to do so, too? Are we changing our teaching practices to rise to that challenge?

Roundtable participants share our evolving thoughts about these questions drawing from our experiences teaching migration history courses in United States history (Padilla-Rodríguez), modern US empire and colonialism (Chua), Latin American history (Newman), and Asian American/Asian diaspora history (Gao). We address how the struggle for migrant rights informs our teaching by thinking through assignments that connect past migrations to the present. Padilla-Rodríguez assigns an oral history project in which students interview anyone in their life who has crossed a border or experienced displacement, whether locally, nationally, or transnationally. Students begin to think capaciously about the categories of the “migrant,” “immigrant,” “refugee,” “citizen,” and “border.” Chua asks students to use fashion to interrogate how US empire and militarism creates the conditions for migration. Newman assigns students a research presentation project in which they build and communicate knowledge about migration in Latin America today while also contextualizing contemporary mobility in a longer history. Gao’s Chinese immigration files assignment invites students to make publicly accessible data from early-20th century interviews between Chinese migrants and immigration officials, using a combination of digital mapping tools and expository analysis. Students grapple with the contingency and on-the-ground negotiations over legal status and border enforcement, past and present. As we discuss how these assignments have worked in recent semesters, the roundtable allows for collective reckoning on the pedagogical and political practices of migration history in authoritarian conditions.