During the past decade, Colombia has received millions of Venezuelan migrants, leading to the creation of new administrative databases and classification categories to assess the magnitude and impacts of this population. One of the major challenges in responding to the migration crisis has been the collection of high-quality data. Based on semistructured interviews and ethnographic observations, we conducted a qualitative case study in 2022 to understand how migrants’ databases, specifically health-related databases, were produced within local institutions in Cúcuta, a frontier Colombian city and one of the reception epicenters of Venezuelan migrants. We aimed to unpack the processes of inclusion and exclusion involved in measuring migrants’ health status. In this endeavor, we found that pendular migration , a nontraditional type of the migration phenomenon, was affecting the performance of health entities and the reliability of migrants’ data and indicators. Framed within an ethnographic analysis of data production, we show that people who oscillate between countries, slipping through borders, also slip through quantification systems. We conclude that the quantification of states could include categories such as pendular migrants to provide evidence of the porosity of the established nation-state order.
Malagón et al. (Sun,) studied this question.