Should Borders Be Open?

• Economists across the ideological spectrum estimate open borders would roughly double world GDP by allowing labor to flow to its highest-value use — it is the most efficient anti-poverty intervention imaginable, and the main argument against it is nationalism, not economics.
• The right to move is already recognized for goods, capital, and data; restricting it for people but not the products they make or money they earn is an arbitrary asymmetry that protects incumbent workers in wealthy countries.
• Every moral intuition that condemns discrimination by race, religion, or gender should also condemn discrimination by birthplace; the passport lottery is the most consequential determinant of life outcomes and the least morally defensible.

Debater: To be announced

• The welfare state requires bounded solidarity: generous social programs exist because citizens are willing to pay for people 'like them'; open borders dissolves the political constituency for redistribution and will accelerate stripping back welfare states to remain fiscally viable.
• Rapid demographic change — even when economically beneficial — strains housing, public services, and social trust faster than democratic institutions can manage; the populist backlash against immigration that fueled authoritarianism across the West is evidence of what happens when pace exceeds absorption capacity.
• Low-wage workers in destination countries bear the largest costs of immigration-driven wage competition while elites who benefit from cheaper labor bear none; open borders is a regressive policy that wealthier, more mobile advocates promote at the expense of those with less bargaining power.

Debater: To be announced