Nations actively write themselves onto human bodies. They etch and scratch their borders onto human flesh with figurative, often contradictory, ink that delivers stark material impact. The impacts hold their greatest force in metering the hinged consequences of contingent citizenship for some and unfettered citizenship for a few others. In this essay, I consider the often overlooked logics of these national scriptings and the curricular potential we lose when we perpetuate the faulty idea that migration is only about movement across countries.