This article addresses two questions. First: How does a state, in casu the Danish welfare state, based on universalism and social rights as regards its citizens, deal with immigrants and their descendents through education? Second: How does such a state manage to make its differential treatment of human beings work legitimately, i.e., what arguments, what interventions and moralisations, are used through the workings of school education? The article carries out an analysis of policies since the 1980s and depicts the construction of ‘the stranger’ parallel to an analysis of the state crafting processes that goes on in terms of professional educational interventions in Højmarken School, a school placed in an urban poor area