Many children with an immigrant background face enormous challenges at school: they need to quickly adjust to different academic expectations, learn in a new language, forge a social identity that incorporates both their background and their adopted country of residence--all while often under conflicting pressures from family and peers. These difficulties in integrating into a new society are magnified when immigrants are segregated in poor neighbourhoods with disadvantaged schools. It should thus come as no surprise that PISA data have consistently shown a performance gap between students with an immigrant background and non-immigrant students. However, PISA also shows that immigrant students can overcome these considerable obstacles and excel academically. The large variation in performance differences between immigrant and non-immigrant students across countries suggests that policy can play an important role in eliminating those disparities. Immigrant students have the potential to perform as well as non-immigrant students, despite the dual challenges of integration and socio-economic disadvantage. Education systems have a role to play in ensuring that immigrant students make the most of the opportunities schools offer. Those that are seeing large migration inflows or changes in the demographic profile of immigrants can learn from systems that offer programmes tailored to immigrant students, such as language classes with clearly defined goals and standards.