National borders are a contentious topic in electoral politics, with arguments over who should be allowed inside or excluded from a given jurisdiction. An even more pressing problem in most of the world, however, is the widespread lack of clearly defined property rights that allow people to live and work securely, argues Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, president of Atlas Network partner Instituto Libertad y Democracia (ILD), in a recent commentary for Fortune.

“The issue of is not just an American problem, nor is it only about immigrants,” de Soto writes in his Fortune commentary. “It’s much bigger than that, as 5 billion of the world’s 7 billion people don´t have the documents to live in a particular place. To be precise, they don’t have the legal property rights required to reside, own assets or do business in their own or any other country. That’s 5 billion without any enforceable guarantee that they will not be expropriated or environmentally contaminated by powerful business, government, terrorists or criminals. That also means they will struggle to have access to credit or the ability to raise capital since borrowers typically need to pledge some kind of property in exchange.”

The tendency to focus on national borders in political debates, de Soto points out, largely distracts from the fact that even millions of people living in their own countries lack the necessary recognized and documented property rights that would allow them to build a better life for themselves by, for instance, leveraging their assets even as small-scale entrepreneurs. During his recent visit to Mexico, Pope Francis made a point of singling out exclusionary U.S. political rhetoric — but this very real problem is not unique to America, de Soto points out.

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Read the full article on the website of Atlas Network