‘Have we ever heard about Ukrainians causing trouble?’ How integration workers in Denmark make sense of the special act on displaced Ukrainians

Restrictive Danish asylum and integration policies were disrupted when, in March 2022, special acts on displaced Ukrainians were launched. Based on narrative interviews with 17 integration workers across four Danish municipalities, and a supplementary documentary assemblage, this article explores how implicated integration workers handled the softer approach to Ukrainians within broader affective economies of the Danish welfare state. It identifies three white ‘sensemakings’: one that counters differential treatment and racialises Ukrainians; another that acknowledges special treatment by reference to proximity, Europeanness and likeness as whiteness; and a third that evades issues of racism and invests in white innocence to focus on organising discriminatory practices. The analysis points to integration work’s ambiguous role in operating the welfare state’s practices of inequality and relational racialisation: malleable racialised denigration of refugeeness and white flexibility that expose some groups to state violence while welcoming and protecting others.