The Global Teach-Ins/Outs

Increasingly, and around the world, migrants are being defined as invaders, a threat to civilization, unwanted, a drain on national wealth, and criminals. Also, around the world, scholars of migration are under threat. Our voices are being silenced and our students deported — all while migrants and refugees face escalating hostility, surveillance, and violence. The Migration Scholars Mobilize Network is a collective response to these attacks (https://migrationscholarsmobilize.org/) The Network opposes all forms of dehumanization and supports all those who struggle for social and economic justice. Migration is a social good, a human right that contributes to the well-being of all of us who aspire to live in a and equitable world.

This network will help us to take two interrelated kinds of action: (1) publicly stand with migrants and refugees in the face of escalating attacks and (2) support each other in the face of increasing attacks in many countries on scholars and scholarship that defends freedom of movement and settlement.

As its first global action the Network is calling for a simultaneous global in person teach-ins/outs to happen in locations around the world on 11 November 2025. These locally situated, globally simultaneous actions will build on the themes “A War on Migrants is a War on All of US; Migration is a Social Good and a Human Right: We Stand with Migrants.”

Background

In the 1960s, searching for a way to condemn the US war in Vietnam, concerned faculty initiated a form of protest called the “-in”. This form of social action originated after a broad coalition faculty at the University of Michigan sought to engage the academic community in self-education about the war. The organizers realized that support for the war was based on distorted history and reporting and that there were many in the academic community who were unaware of the history of the Vietnam people’s struggles for national liberation and the nature of the US engagement in Vietnam.

The teach-ins were not a conference, a demonstration or a lecture. They were rather a time of learning, sharing, and growing. The concept proved to very effective, and spread across US campuses, bringing tens of thousands of students and faculty into the anti-war movement. The teach-ins were effective because they attracted those who were curious rather than only those already opposed to the war. They engaged the participants in a dynamic of community, action, hope, and determination that was transformative for those who attended. Teach-ins worked best when people weren’t lectured at but felt engaged in a project of investigation to understand what the hell was going on. Often, they were held all night, when classes weren’t in session.

That Was Then and This Is Now

In some ways the situation now is not very different in the US and around the world than when the teach-ins began. It is not different in terms of polarization growing political repression almost everywhere. To oppose the draft or question the government in the US in the decade after 1950s McCarthyism, when public employees including faculty had to sign loyalty oaths, was not an easy step to take. Similarly. at various times since World War II, in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, people have faced off against colonial, neocolonial, and dictatorial regimes. Those regimes have implemented or are implementing military rule, massive waves of repression, imprisonment, and disappearances.

However, the situation we face now is different because around the world attacks on migrants have become the cutting edge of the efforts to legitimate repressive legislation. Yet, in many countries people don’t understand that attacks on migrants are attacks on everyone’s democratic rights. Politicians –often on the left as well as on the right—falsely argue that the country is being invaded by people from elsewhere, who are threatening their social fabric and depleting national wealth. Moreover, news comes from social media and influencers, who magnify false reports and misrepresent the basic facts about migration. And, at this moment migration is not the central concern of most students, academics, local communities, and community organizations.

At the same time, in the US mass detention and deportations initiated by unidentified, masked, heavily armed men, who are invading workplaces, courts, hospitals, and neighborhoods and rounding up migrant men, women, and are sending shock waves around the world. There is a nascent understanding that attacks on migrants open the way to legitimating a militarized state, a police state. This uneasiness is resonating in many other countries, including those subject to the arrival of deportees, and the practice of externalizing borders.

In person, face-to-face social community building through teach-ins/outs on migration can build on this growing unease, questioning, curiosity. The encampment movement last year demonstrated how young people and community members could become socially engaged through direct in person participation. These kinds of actions bring people into political life so that they can confront and stop the growing threats to everyone’s rights.

These actions move people from cynicism and despair to hope, social solidarity and political action.

So, the time is now to speak to speak to those who are beginning to question why states are denying the right to move, settle, work and contribute to society and reap the fruits of one’s labor. We propose these teach-ins/outs as a form of social action that doesn’t occupy but does educate, providing space for discussion, questioning, testimony, and solidarity.

How Can We Do This?

Where: Many of us have the authority and voice as migration scholars to use classrooms, places of worship, library auditoriums and public parks. We can use all these spaces— hence teach-ins/outs. We can organize these actions in academic communities and also reach out to locations in our local city or town where people can gather together, question, discuss and learn.

When Can We Do This?: These simultaneous teach-ins/outs need to happen as soon as possible since authoritarian attacks on migration and the right to speak and protest is happening in multiple countries. We suggest 11, November 2025. This is Armistice/Remembrance Day, an excellent occasion to remember the resolve at the end of World War I to build a peaceful democratic world. We want to end the war on migrants, counter nationalist anti- immigrant narratives, and rededicate the day to solidarity with people’s determination to build a better world.

What will make it interesting/attract participation and publicity

1. These events will be happening on the same day(s) globally.

2. These events will be social happening, NOT a lecture, academic panel discussion, rally or demonstration. They may go on all day or into the night or all night.

3. The Network will provide local committees with materials they can use, if they choose—videos, hand-outs, discussion questions, graphics.

4. The events will include local artists --graphic, visual- and musical.

5. The global simultaneous/ social happening, engagement of young and old, and historic reference to teach-ins aspect of these actions will be a basis for publicity of multiple types.

To help or support the organizing of these happenings please contact migrationscholarsnetwork@gmail.com or contact Migration Scholars Network, a WhatsApp Community.