Although the historiography of migrant education is, in many ways, problematic—especially the lack of historical literature for many regions of the world—general patterns do arise. As nation-states and their educational systems began to emerge and develop in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the schooling of migrant children often focused on assimilating them into the national culture. In the decades following the Second World War, the heavy-handed acculturation began to give way to more multicultural notions of schooling, although, in practice, multicultural education often simplified cultural differences and continued, albeit in different ways, to demand a sort of conformity to the new national, multicultural norms, thus undermining a true acceptance of all migrant populations.
