The climate crisis and immigration are popularly seen as two powerful “global forces” that threaten the long-term viability and relevance of nation-states. Much attention has been paid to the ways that these forces are causally related, as the changing climate pushes migrants away from their places of origin. In this dissertation, I look at a different kind of relationship, namely how understandings of climate and the environment influence the reception of immigrants and imagination of the host country’s future. In Norway, these concerns center on the welfare state, which actors across the political spectrum agree, albeit for different reasons, both cannot continue to rely on national oil revenues for its financing and does not adequately support an increasingly diverse population. These challenges are intertwined even in the language people use to speak about them: calls for “sustainability,” a concept derived from planetary concerns about the supply of natural resources, are now also organizing debates about immigration in urban neighborhoods, and justifying neoliberal reforms to the welfare state. This dissertation, based on over 18 months of fieldwork in and around the linguistically, religiously, racially, and socioeconomically heterogeneous neighborhood of Tøyen in central Oslo, investigates the ways in which neighbors, municipal employees, national politicians, business developers, and the news media understand these “global challenges,” and how they variously take up the neighborhood as a way to test out or resist efforts to make the welfare state more “sustainable.” I argue that people negotiate what is naturalized as the “global” through a myriad of scale-making projects, which are based on measurement, calculation, and comparison. These projects can be spatial, as my interlocutors contest how “the neighborhood” should fit within the rest of the city, nation, and world. They can also be temporal, as policymakers try to justify short-term precarity in the name of long-term viability. Finally, these scalar projects can be sociopolitical, as my interlocutors make comparisons between foreigners and citizens in ways that reinforce or contest standard understandings of Norwegian belonging. In all cases, I show how semiotic processes produce and uphold these scalar understandings, and how taking up some scales but not others, and placing oneself and others on those scales, are ways for social actors to make ethical claims and persuade in policy matters. The dissertation pays particular attention to the linguistic and other semiotic practices through which these social actors make their scalar understandings and visions for the future of the Norwegian welfare state authoritative. I show how my interlocutors mobilize a regime of value focused on conflict-avoidance and listening as a way to both strategically erase or deny differences in some contexts, and to dismiss critiques in others. Through an analysis of these scalar and other linguistic practices, the dissertation shows the particularities of how a transition away from a twentieth century welfare model, frequently described as neoliberal, works out in a place that much of the world imagines as one of the last holdouts of this postwar social experiment.