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This paper explores the institutional and everyday conditions that define 'deportability' as a lived experience at the social margin. Focusing on Germany as a paradigmatic case for the new immigration and deportation policies of the new Europe, it investigates state rationales through which certain bodies are produced as 'deportable' and takes a specific look at the role of medicine in this matter. The first part of the text traces a genealogy of various forms of medical intervention. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out from September 2003 to April 2005 in an institutional setting in Frankfurt/Main, the main focus of the discussion is the situation of traumatized refugees and asylum seekers, for whom German asylum and immigration law reserves special conditions. The second part investigates how the issue of deportability is negotiated by Punjabis in Germany's Rhein-Main area. It can be discerned from both perspectives-state-centred as well as community-centred-that the body of the migrant has become a locus of otherness and bearer of debts in relation to the state. And yet the margin acquires significantly different meanings when approached through an ethnography of migrant communities and localities, for it is here that, as a social context and particular form, the margin is both a lived reality and site of intervention.

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This article explores how Sikh youth in Toronto respond—through personal narratives and performative practices—to past events of violence associated with the Indian Army’s 1984 attack on the “Golden Temple” in Amritsar, as well as the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi, India. Arguably, the politics of representation around the “Punjab crisis” of 1984 have been considered crucial for conceptualizing Sikh diaspora formations. However, studying how young Sikh activists relate to these events today and redefine their own sense of diasporic citizenship a generation after the event allows us to challenge both the homogeneous framings of (religious) diaspora and the primary role attributed to trauma through which past injuries are narrated. I shall demonstrate that there is a discursive trope (or tendency) in youth accounts that, on the one hand, asserts an attachment to injury as well as the separatist and nationalist sentiments that have long been embodied in representations of 1984 and, on the other, points to identity formations yet to be defined within the context of emerging “transnational second generations.” Moreover, Sikh youth are engaged in increasingly diverse forms of social justice work and have different motivations for their participation. This research reveals involvement in an emerging grass roots movement that is globally tuned into broader social justice struggles, while maintaining local ties to place specific engagements and narratives.