Freedom of Movement of the Deceased. Considerations from the Mexican-United States Border
In this paper I argue that national and supranational policies facilitate the mobility of deceased migrants while increasingly constraining and limiting the mobility of live migrants, especially when they are sick, marginal or from poor countries. I defend this hypothesis using two Mexican-American cases that show that a) once dead, migrants and marginalized persons, placed outside the community of citizens during their lifetime, are authorized by states to become reintegrated; b) that, while states rely on the laws in force as regards the circulation of the living, for the mobility of the dead, they rely on universal values that legitimize the belonging of the deceased to a wider national community.