ABSTRACT Following scholars who critique integration with a homemaking lens (Boccagni and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2023), this paper studies the impact of immigration- and integration policies on Syrian and Eritrean women’s homemaking processes in the Netherlands, and produces knowledge on the gendered effects of migration-related policies on individuals (Freedman 2017). Based on analyses of legal and policy documents, and life history interviews, observations, and mapping- and photo journaling exercises held with forty-five Syrian and Eritrean women in the Netherlands, I show how procedures to obtain legal residence, reception centres, different legal statuses, spatial dispersal policy, the Integration Act and the Participation Act pursue a ‘politics of discomfort’ (Darling 2011). While designed to promote ‘integration’, these policies construct a demanding, opaque and punitive system that restricts individual control and subjects homemaking to ‘path dependencies’. This discomfort is gendered, as policies occasionally reinforce women’s dependence on men, perpetuate racialised and gendered stereotypes, and break down especially women’s work- and social roles. As the system renders homemaking in public difficult, it induces women’s isolation. Contesting state-inflicted uncertainty, exclusion and isolation, many Syrian and Eritrean women eventually do manage to (re)make home. However, the Dutch state works to produce rather than repair their generally underprivileged position in Dutch society.