In the context of the European Union, migration-related issues have become of paramount importance in recent years for governmental activity, raising the need to study, categorize and support migrant populations and to foster their integration. In order to create and expand a social care network responsible for monitoring and managing immigrants, funding has been made available, and impressive efforts have been made at both national and supra-national levels in policy development and programmes implementation. These programmes, in our perspective, revolve around what we will call the vulnerability/risk dichotomy. On the one hand, there is a representation which often links immigrants with deviance, social insecurity, social inability, and criminality, thus constituting a risk for society. On the other hand, they are also conceived as being in trouble, victims of a traumatic displacement, needy and unprotected, in a permanent state of vulnerability. This dichotomy constructs the idea that there is something inherently 'problematic' about being a migrant, thus requiring solutions to control 'risk behaviours' and to look after 'vulnerable conditions'. The main goal of the project is thus, rather than taking for granted vulnerability and risk as a natural condition in migration, to provide a critical inquiry into the social care sector targeting migrants and promoting their integration in contemporary Portugal, providing a much needed assessment of these interventions, and witnessing - through an ethnographic analysis of several specific contexts - how these policies work in practice and how they affect migrants populations. The project will investigate how these interventions aim at building mainstream forms of citizenship and personhood, commonly resting on unexpressed ethnocentric and culture-specific moral assumptions. Consequently, we intend to document and assess the institutional, social, and cultural violence migrants have to face when the social sector interven...