Deportability, Medicine, and the Law

Abstract

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.