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SOCIAL REALITIES OF INCREASING (super-)diversity, mobility, and the corresponding high appraisal of linguistic competences and skills are currently not developing—as was expected—into egalitarian systems and structures in multilingual communities. To the contrary, much evidence of how former inequalities, prejudices, and social and linguistic hierarchies are still active and even amplified abounds in many apparently liberal societies. This paper focuses precisely on this issue, examining how various late-capitalist and postcolonial regimes recast new forms of diversity into old molds through the implementation of language-education policies and programs. In what follows we explore the main forces and processes that perpetuate inequality, some of which simply continue outdated dispensations while others present innovations even if still not bringing fundamental change. Particularly, we focus on the impact that neoliberal policies have in schools, the transnational division of labor and the persistence of knowledge, values, and ideologies rooted on the colonial past. The interplay of these processes and their impact on the recent proliferation of language programs, and on how diversity is recast, is substantiated in an illustrative section where we refer to three specific educational contexts which represent different national arrangements: South Africa, the United States, and Argentina. We consider different kinds of language programs, and examine different dimensions of the educational processes (from linguistic policies to local practices in classrooms) in these settings. Focusing on these three situations, this paper aims to develop an understanding of what the social, economic, organizational, and even epistemological conditions are that contribute to the perpetuation of inequalities.