In line with public debates, literature about migration and the welfare state deals mainly with the challenges that migration poses to welfare states, such as being a welfare magnet, financial sustainability and social legitimacy. However, the role of the state in structuring migrants’ careers through the welfare state and inequalities in these through legal categories, conditions and practices remains largely uncharted territory. Particularly relevant are social assistance careers as social assistance, ultimate safety net and seismograph of (new) risk situations, is the most used benefit scheme at arrival. Of the extra-European migrants who entered Belgium in the period 2008–2014 15% took up social assistance during the first years after arrival. Cohorts of extra-European nationals navigate among the changing legally allowed motives for migration that define the conditions of entry and stay and social assistance access that can alter over time. In general, access to social assistance became more restrictive over the last decade. Furthermore, social assistance uptake is conditional on having a valid residence permit and legal residence in the municipality. Therefore, in this paper we examine jointly the social assistance and residence trajectories by legal category for a one-in-four random sample of the non-European migrants aged 18 and over that arrived during the period 2008–2014 (N=87,653). We trace their trajectories up to 2014 on the basis of, to international standards, unique linked longitudinal administrative data from the National Register and the Datawarehouse Labour Market and Social Protection. To analyse the trajectories we use descriptive and advanced event-history analysis techniques, such as joint analysis of correlated processes and multistate modelling, which is apt to model transitions between event types with an event-related dependence. Theoretically, we mobilise life-course theory to show how the state structures life courses through temporal ordering and normative scripts.