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This article revisits the state-immigrant nexus by exploring the making of immigrant schoolchildren and their families as precarious elements in the population management of the Danish welfare nation-state. The emphasis is on how immigrant schoolchildren and their families have become a problem, and what forms of knowledge, differentiations, technologies and rationalities emerge from the efforts made to understand and solve the problem(s) since their appearance on Danish territory from the 1970s and onwards. The article explores a diverse set of historical-empirical national and local government documents advancing a polyhedron of intelligibility by which the authors discover how problem-solving complexes responsive to immigrant schoolchildren and their families change and overlay each other in a diachronic perspective. The argument presented is that the problem-solving complexes reflect the ambiguous (re)crafting of the Danish welfare nation-state faced with intensified South-North/East-West labour immigration, UN-mandated refugee distribution and global economic restructuring. ; This article explores the making of immigrant families as precarious elements in the governing of the population's welfare within the Danish welfare nation-state since the 1970s. The emphasis is on how immigrant families became a problem of welfare governing, and what knowledge practices and welfare technologies emerged as problem-solving responses. The article analyses a diverse set of national and local administrative documents advancing a polyhedron of intelligibility by which the authors discover how problem-solving complexes responsive to immigrant families change and sediment, and ultimately, weave the fabric of a Danish welfare nation-state faced with non-Western immigration after the economic boom in the late 1960s.