In this article we study ways in which the relationship between housing and integration of migrants are being justified and legitimated in policy documents from the cities of Arnhem and Nijmegen. Making use of a critical frame analysis, we are particularly interested in the assumptions made with regard to the preferred population composition of neighbourhoods, images of ‘normality’ and ‘the ideal society’. Based on the analysis of a set of policy documents (such as the most recent coalition agreement, housing policy document and several neighbourhood plans of each city) and a pilot study that includes interviews with local administrators and residents of twelve neighbourhoods, we found that most problems that are being related to residential segregation in neighbourhoods are defined in socio-economic terms. In general, the data show that the mixing of people with different socio-economic positions is thought to be the solution to this problem. References to migrants are mainly indirect: many documents mention that a large part of the poor people are migrants. The issue of integration is mostly dealt with in documents that focus on so-called ‘problem neighbourhoods’. We conclude that the desirability of diverse neighbourhoods in terms of types of housing and groups of people is widespread. Yet the assumptions on which these ideas are built remain largely implicit.

This article demonstrates on the basis of a representative survey among the Dutch population (N=1,892) that it is not necessarily politically ‘rightist’ or ‘conservative’ to resist the toleration of illegal activities (‘gedoogbeleid’). Even though, generally speaking, political conservatives are most likely to be critical, this is merely because they unconsciously associate the latter with practices of tolerating illegal activities by marginal individuals. Whereas conservatives hence oppose the latter more than political progressives do, the latter for their part are more critical than conservatives about tolerating illegal activities by official agencies. These findings illustrate that gedoogbeleid does not have a universal legitimacy in the eyes of the public, but that its legitimacy is determined case by case by the concrete aims and targets addressed by this policy instrument.