Schools are one of the institutions that determine the possibilities to participate in society. Therefore, access to education is crucial to the settlement process of immigrants, minorities, and their offspring. Newcomers who join a community have always faced different membership regimes, long before the emergence of the nation-state in the nineteenth century. Such regimes determine whether, to what extent, and under what conditions children of migrants and minorities have access to schools. They also determine whether schools are segregated along religious, racial, or socioeconomic lines. These conditions are not limited to international migrants, but may also apply to internal migrants, such as low-income Chinese people who have moved from the countryside to large cities since the early 1980s and have limited access to (more expensive) urban schools. In this essay, I compare different parts of the world over the past five centuries to understand how polities allow or restrict access to education, and to what extent schools function as gateways to full participation in societies for children of migrants and minorities.