Border, Body, and Debt -  Why No One Migrates Without a Wounded Territory

No one migrates without a wounded territory. Even when the decision appears individual, economic, or familial, there is an earlier cause: some body-territory stopped sustaining water, food, security, work, belonging, freedom, future, or peace. The border only appears at the end of the scene. Before it, there was a rupture of Nerope: the vital flow that allows one to sleep, move, work, raise children, study, care for elders, speak one’s own language, and imagine tomorrow. For this reason, migration should not be read first as a border crisis, but as a symptom of a State that failed to keep the body-territory of origin alive.

Latin America already knows this in its own body. The Venezuelan situation, for example, has become one of the world’s largest displacement crises: UNHCR reports almost 7.9 million Venezuelan refugees and migrants globally, most of them in Latin America and the Caribbean. (unhcr.org) The number matters, but the number is still an effect. The cause is the failure of a territory to continue offering material, political, and symbolic conditions for life. When millions leave, they are not leaving only a country; they are leaving a broken Nerope.

The Darién crossing shows the mistake of treating migration as a barrier problem. In 2024, more than 300,000 people crossed that jungle between Colombia and Panama, down from the 2023 record, but still on a dramatic scale; most were Venezuelan, and containment policies did not solve the cause, only reorganized the risk. (reuters.com) A hardened border may reduce passage at one point, but it does not heal the wounded body-territory that pushed the person out. When the State responds only with fences, fines, deportation, or screening, it acts on the effect and abandons the cause.

In this sense, Citizen DREX must evolve into Immigrant DREX. If each Latin American State is structured around body-territory, no human being should lose their material base when crossing a border. The right to come and go is only real if the economic system does not punish the body for moving. Immigrant DREX would recognize that a person carries body-territory even outside their country. Migration stops being administrative abandonment and becomes continuity of life: if one State failed to sustain its citizen, another State can welcome without turning reception into charity.

This proposal changes political accounting. If the country of origin does not deliver Immigrant DREX to its displaced body-territory, the receiving country delivers provisional Citizen DREX, guarantees a minimum ground of life, and records that value as a debt in trade relations, regional compensations, or multilateral agreements. In this way, the debt stops falling on the migrant and begins falling on the State that ruptured Nerope. The migrant should not pay for the institutional failure that expelled them. The body must not become debt; the State that wounded the body-territory must be called into debt.

ECLAC has defended universal, comprehensive, sustainable, and resilient social protection systems in response to social development gaps in the region. (cepal.org) This reference supports the turn: it is not enough to regularize documents; materiality must be guaranteed. Body-territorial social protection does not ask only whether the migrant entered legally. It asks whether they eat, sleep, work, learn, care, contribute, and belong. Without this base, the border becomes a biological filter: some bodies cross with capital, language, and contracts; others cross with hunger, trauma, and suspicion.

It is also necessary to fight the lie that the migrant is only a cost. Studies on economic integration show that migrants can contribute to receiving economies when they have access to formal work, services, and regularization. The IDB analyzed the socioeconomic integration of migrants in Latin American countries, including labor market participation, informality, schooling, and living conditions. (publications.iadb.org) In Brazil, research on the Venezuelan crisis in Roraima found small or negligible displacement effects on formal Brazilian workers, with wage increases in some sectors. (arxiv.org) The problem, therefore, is not the migrant body; it is the State that keeps that body informal, exploitable, and politically vulnerable.

Immigrant DREX would also protect the receiving country. Today, when a city welcomes migrants without regional compensation, tension falls on local schools, health care, housing, and labor, creating fertile ground for xenophobia. But that tension is an effect; the cause is a fiscal architecture that leaves reception without backing. If value follows the body, the city that receives is not punished for welcoming. The immigrant begins to arrive with income, registration, public traceability, productive integration, and a regional obligation of compensation. Reception stops competing with the local resident and begins to expand the economic base of the territory.

This logic also shifts sovereignty. The old sovereignty said: “each State takes care only of its own.” Body-territorial sovereignty says: “every Latin American body must be supported in any Latin American territory.” This does not eliminate borders, documents, or national responsibilities. On the contrary: it makes borders more honest, because it recognizes that economies, sanctions, debts, climate crises, organized crime, mining, hunger, and political collapses already cross borders before people do. A study by Francisco Rodríguez on sanctions and Venezuelan migration, for example, argues that external economic policies can influence migration flows by affecting revenues and productivity. (arxiv.org) If the cause is transnational, the repair must also be transnational.

No one migrates merely because they “want to.” A person migrates because they compare risks: staying may be worse than crossing. The IOM World Migration Report shows that human mobility involves conflict, inequalities, climate change, work, family networks, protection, and the search for security. (publications.iom.int) The cause is never singular. It is fractal: in the body there is hunger; in the family there is fear; in the territory there is collapse; in the State there is failure; in the market there is debt; in the climate there is drought; in politics there is capture. The border sees a line. The body-territory sees a causal chain.

For this reason, Immigrant DREX would not be merely a currency. It would be an ethics of non-abandonment. Each displaced body would carry a minimum right to material continuity, and each State would be called to answer for its capacity or incapacity to sustain Nerope. The migrant would no longer be treated as human surplus, but recognized as body-territory in transit. If the country of origin does not sustain, the region sustains; if the region sustains, the account returns to the economic architecture that produced the rupture.

The final question is not “how do we stop them from crossing?” That is the question of the effect. The causal question is: which territory was wounded so that crossing seemed like the only way to remain alive? The Latin American New World begins when no body has to choose between border and abandonment. It begins when the right to come and go stops being an abstract freedom and becomes economic infrastructure. It begins when Citizen DREX, upon encountering migration, becomes Immigrant DREX. Because no body-territory should feel abandoned simply for crossing a line drawn on a map.

Commented references after 2021

1. UNHCR. “Venezuela Situation” - 2026

Supports the regional scale of Venezuelan migration, with almost 7.9 million Venezuelan refugees and migrants globally, many of them in Latin America and the Caribbean. It helps show that migration is a rupture of body-territory, not merely a border event. (unhcr.org)

2. Reuters. “Over 300,000 migrants crossed Latin America’s Darien Gap in 2024” - 2025

Supports the section on the Darién as a visible effect of prior causes. The report shows the scale of the crossing, the Venezuelan majority, and the limits of containment policies that do not confront the causes of migration. (reuters.com)

3. ECLAC. “Social Panorama of Latin America and the Caribbean, 2024” - 2024

Supports the need for universal, comprehensive, sustainable, and resilient social protection systems in the region. It helps ground Immigrant DREX as material protection, not merely documentary regularization. (cepal.org)

4. IDB / OECD. “How Do Migrants Fare in Latin America and the Caribbean?” - 2023

Supports the analysis of migrants’ socioeconomic integration in Latin American countries, including labor market participation, informality, schooling, and living conditions. It helps challenge the view of migrants as a simple cost. (publications.iadb.org)

5. Hugo Sant’Anna and Samyam Shrestha. “Labor Market Effects of the Venezuelan Refugee Crisis in Brazil” - 2023

Supports the discussion of the effects of Venezuelan migration on the Brazilian labor market, especially in Roraima, showing that the effects on local workers do not confirm the simplistic narrative of generalized job displacement. (arxiv.org)

6. Francisco Rodríguez. “Sanctions and Venezuelan Migration” - 2024

Supports the idea that migration causes may involve transnational economic architecture, including sanctions and their effects on revenues, imports, and productivity. It helps justify the logic of regional compensation and debt between States. (arxiv.org)

7. IOM. “World Migration Report 2024” - 2024

Supports a broad reading of human mobility as a phenomenon linked to inequality, conflict, work, security, social networks, climate, and protection. It helps ground the critique of the border as a reduced reading of the effect. (publications.iom.int)