The 2025 Cambridge Schools Round 3 motion was memorable. This house prefers a world with no restrictions on immigration.
Prep Time
Me and my partner were doing pretty well with 4 points from a possible 6. That changed pretty quickly as we crashed and burned, losing out to some team from Hong Kong, and some other guys from Scotland and another English private school school. I think in the real debate we messed up the motion so badly we were pushing arguments which relied upon nations not existing, obviously missing the point.
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| The Cambridge Union |
For whatever reason I'm thinking about this on Christmas Day so let me try prep time again. The thing with the 'prefers a world' motion type is that you're meant to imagine a world where whatever you're discussing has (or hasn't) been implemented.
In this specific case the question we're asked is what would a borderless world have looked like if it had existed for all of human history. However, to be pedantic, restrictions on immigration are a relatively new thing. I want to say the mid to late 19th century is where we can definitively start from. In Britain the 1790s Alien Act is the first recorded example. I'm pretty certain we forgot about this in the real thing.
Mindset shift
The first thing to do is to frame what no restrictions on immigration actually looks like. I think this is pretty intuitive but just to clarify. This would look like if individuals would be able to move nation to nation without fear of criminalisation. Our world is one where you won't need to apply for visas to travel, and there'd no such thing as border walls such as in North East Egypt or the proposed one on the Mexico-America border.
I think the first argument to try and imagine, is the current issue with the status quo. Individuals are locked out of wealth creation and high level jobs simply due to their location in the world. A Nigerian electrician may feel he isn't earning enough compared to what his skills command and wait to move to America, however
Additionally, there's a pretty fringe argument of leisure and access to culture and foreign services with relative ease. Don't think it's that important though.
The main push I have is the potential for wealth redistribution. This theory was put in greater detail in the book Abolition Revolution, which I've probably quoted in a number of blog posts now. The basic claim is that the West has been able to benefit from the availability of cheap labour from the developing world, where individuals lack of resources has stifled their ability to generate human capital and break out of cycles of poverty. Through this, they are pushed to leave their nations and come to the West, where they are pushed into filling vacancies. The claim from government here is that when individuals leave and take advantage of having no restrictions on immigration they pay something known as remittance, or money back home. This is a custom when emigrating from poorer nations where the purchasing power of the new currency the individual has is significantly greater than what they have in their original country. This is likely to happen primarily due to family pressure as well as those from friends to support them back at home, an immigrant, who still aims to support those close to them. Additionally, as we assume this has been in place for the length of time, there's a large incentive for firms to create technology to enable this, slightly faster than in the current status quo. Why is this so beneficial? We can probably mitigate any opposition argument of brain drain and poorer developing nations by saying that remittance will be used as a powerful tool of wealth redistribution, helping the moving individual as well as those from their country of origin.
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| Aviah Sarah Day and Shanice McBean - The Authors of Abolition Revolution |
The nationalist perspective
In the actual tournament we were in opening opposition, so I'll try and generate arguments from the opposition perspective.
The first thing I can think is the mass level of global inequality. No restrictions on immigration would have allowed for a greater incentive for people to move away from regions on poverty into regions on wealth. The way development occurs in developing nations is the improvement of living standards of the population. No restrictions on immigration would mean that wealthier nations would have to accept increased levels of immigration, from this group they are incentivised to large those of the highest quality. This could look like foreign advertisement or incentives for skilled workers. In turn, this would immediately diminish the number of working people in developing nations, harming everything from technological advancement to the production of infrastructure. Those who aren't financially able to utilise the open border immigration policy is that they are locked into a nation with poorer quality public services with a government with less tax revenue
The second reasonable case you can run is that why people leaving their country of origin is just a bad thing in general. This type of argument has been done in other motions but it basically goes. Action X is bad, this policy will create more of Action X, Action X is bad. I've used this in a motion of why policing hate speech is bad, saying why people going to jail is always a negative. In this case it's a bit more difficult but I'll try. Immigrants are often swayed by promises, the big example being that the streets are paved with gold, creating a utopia like vision of what a new world is meant to be like. We can pretty intuitively say that more immigration will happen, now we have to explain why immigrants face a difficult life. Firstly we can point to the likelihood of underemployment, when someone is overqualified for a role. Immigrants often face nations where vacancies are scarce and are often for low-skilled jobs. Someone trained in computing might only be able to work as a security guard or cleaner. The impact on the individual is pretty clear. A lack of fulfilment and meaning derived from employment is a key driver in poor mental health, something felt by greater numbers in this motion. Additionally, there's still the clear issue of discrimination, unrestricted immigration will give greater reason for locals to develop a negative feeling towards immigrants. This would fuel discrimination and harm to greater levels than seen in status quo.
This is basically how debate prep works, hopefully this helps anyone who's got a competition coming up.