Is a world without any borders a good idea?

Countries cannot economically or politically sustain open borders

Question: Is a world without any borders a good idea?
Position‹2 of 2: No, we should keep our borders
Argument‹4 of 4: Countries cannot economically or politically sustain open borders

Opening all borders would result in everyone migrating to richer, safer countries. These countries do not have the societal infrastructure to sustain the influx of immigrants.

The argument

Borders provide economic stability. In any nation, there is a limited number of resources: vehicles on the road that the city infrastructure can support, public school capacities, and hospital beds. Without borders, mass immigration would overflow the nation and its infrastructure, leading to total disorder. The European Union's open borders and lessened immigration restrictions have economic downsides. Locals cannot compete with cheap foreign labor. Places to live are harder and more expensive to come across. Eastern European countries are facing a shortage of doctors and nurses because they opt to move west for better economic opportunities. While open borders may benefit skilled migrants who are free to move where there are better opportunities, countries with these better opportunities cannot sustain the influx of immigrants. Borders are needed to provide geographic boundaries of national sovereignty. Borders help define who can receive state benefits, and who is under the government's jurisdiction. The people's social contract with each other and with the government cannot exist without borders, immigration restrictions, and enforced rules for attaining citizenship. Without borders, governments could potentially claim jurisdiction to intervene in any country's space, which would cause more chaos than border disputes do today. Nation-states must have borders to function properly. Democracy flourishes when its citizens can play a role in the political process, and maintaining borders helps define who can or cannot participate in a country's political functions.

Context

Nations' societal infrastructures are fragile and can barely sustain their own citizens. Opening borders on a world-wide scale would cause chaos.

Premises

[P1]Nations have finite resources—road capacity, school places, hospital beds—so without borders, mass immigration would overflow infrastructure and cause disorder, as the EU's open borders have strained local labour, housing, and healthcare. [P2] Borders also define national sovereignty, jurisdiction, and eligibility for state benefits, underpinning the social contract and the democratic process that requires knowing who may participate. [C] Because countries cannot economically or politically sustain open borders, we should keep our borders.

Counter-arguments

Immigrants are not a drain on the economy. Rather, immigrants bolster an economy. Increased productivity from increased migration will help countries gain the resources to sustain an increased population.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Infrastructure capacity is not fixed, and the premise treats the number of school places, hospital beds and homes as a natural limit when each is set by past investment decisions that respond to population; the EU examples also describe internal free movement between member states with a common regulatory framework, which is not the open-borders proposal under discussion. [Rejecting P2] The sovereignty point does more work than the conclusion needs and less than it claims: defining who may vote, who receives benefits and who falls under a jurisdiction are questions of membership that can be settled by residence or citizenship rules, and the premise supplies no reason those must be enforced by restricting movement — so it establishes that states need rules of membership, not that they need borders in the sense at issue.