In recent years scholars have observed a restrictive turn in West European immigrant integration policies towards ‘civic’ conditioning –including testing of competences in the language, history and political values of the recipient society, political loyalty, and labour market skills – for permanent residence and citizenship. Migration scholars are debating whether this convergence is moving Europe beyond national models and beyond previous polarization between ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘nationalism’.  In this panel we address the civic turn in immigrant policies as it plays out in the geo-political contexts of four Nordic states: Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. These countries have manifold features in common, notably a comprehensive and generous system of benefits and welfare services which are largely universal, in the sense that they are intended for the whole population and not only for particularly vulnerable groups. This universal welfare state plays a crucial role in how all four countries conceive of their national identity and distinctness.  Whereas this would make us expect to find great coherence in the way Nordic countries conceptualize and respond to immigration-related challenges, there is in fact significant variation. The countries’ institutional similarities provide a near-optimal setting to investigate if and how structural logics are mediated by ideas, which reflect historical path dependencies, about the nation, trust and societal cohesion, as well as the electoral logics of votes and office. This panel is based on papers to appear in a special issue of the journal Comparative Migration Studies which will be published in the second half of 2016.