Welfare state policies, social workers, and institutions are not only key for organizing services and distributing social benefits for those in need, but also play an important role in the administration of migration and in the practices of differential inclusion in the welfare state based on the non-citizens’ legal status. Analyzing 12 key policy documents on the provision of basic social protection to non-citizens in Malmö and in Helsinki, the paper inquiries into what kind of groups of non-citizens are produced through policy categorizations, how the access to social protection for these groups are governed, and what kind of role social workers are ascribed to in this entanglement. Using the WPR-approach and critical frame analysis, the paper suggests that the policies produce precarity, but tendencies of municipal activism in social work are also identified. The findings are addressed through four overlapping policy frames: the production of the underserving subjects-frame; the precarious inclusion-frame; the armed love-frame drawing on the work by Miriam Ticktin; and the municipal activism in social work-frame. The paper contributes to the social work literature on non-citizens’ position in the welfare state by shedding light on how the differentiation of the access to welfare is produced, and how social work is ascribed both to reproduce and challenge this differentiation.