This paper focuses Swedish local integration politics and the specific ways immigrated women active in different women’s associations meet the Swedish society and local authorities and on how negotiations on similarities and differences are made, with a special focus on immigrant women's situation.

Four Swedish municipalities have been selected for this study on how integration is implemented and how ideas about integration produce and reproduce both local and national space. The empirical material of the paper consists of interviews with politicians and officials, as well as with immigrant women in various associations and organizations.

The paper concludes that integration may be likened to a space of similarity, as integration is construed by means of different metaphors as a move from something “outside” to Sweden, as a room to be entered. The policy and practice of integration is shown to be based on a (dis)similarity paradox in that integration is constructed on a discourse of similarity at the same time as assumptions and constructions of difference are a fundamental point of departure for the policy objectives. The paper also concludes that the template of immigrant women make real immigrant women unseen and faced out. Their associations are regarded as a space between home and society, why they are often given additional support, with the logic that immigrated women need help to come out of their homes. These facts are something the interviewed immigrated women are aware of and try to navigate through in their everyday life.