This paper addresses a period of embedding, as Achille Mbembe puts it when discussing the novelty of the postcolony (Mbembe 2001: 242, 01/09/2008); in this paper the term applies to conceptualise particular social processes of state/citizen entanglement within the realm of western welfare bureaucracy. Drawing on eight months of fieldwork among suburban ghetto-dwellers in Gellerupparken, the largest immigrant neighbourhood in Denmark, I discuss bureaucracy as it unfolds in practice and narratives among local citizens in processes of criminalisation and legalisation. I argue that the marginality of immigrant communities – as experience and structure – only relates to certain domains within the socioeconomic sphere of the modern state. Other domains, such as the bureaucratic welfare services or the juridico-legal structures position immigrants ghettos at the very centre of the state, by which the concept of welfare, moral order and legality is constantly negotiated and reconstituted. From this perspective, I explore everyday ghetto life as frontier practices within the community and with the state.
