The strengths to opening the borders seem to be very clear with very few oppositions. The strengths that are portrayed in the reading we conducted were quite simple.

Since we are looking at opening the borders from a Utilitarian Stand point, the first point we see that is a strength is improving the GHP. The GHP, Greatest Happiness Principle, goes as follows: “what does the most good for the biggest amount of people(Rodriguez)”. We imply this when looking at opening the borders because it would help thousands of people improve their way of life, hence the GHP defense. By improving the lives of those people would improve the happiness level of them but also for those who opened up the borders because essentially we would feel good about giving those people the, “gift” of happiness.

The second strength is that it would increase or even double GDP. GDP stands for Gross Domestic Product which is a measure for all the goods and services produced in a certain time. Opening the borders would improve global GDP. We are taking a look at Openborders, and they say that “even if these gains are significantly overstated, the gains from open borders for global production could still be huge. Even a 10% increase in global production means several trillion dollars of additional wealth creation every year.” All this means is that if they open borders the benefits would increase production to match the new demand that is happening.

One of the last strengths is that it would decrease poverty, or as Open Borders puts, end poverty. We begin to look at poverty as a whole. There is bigger percent of people who are poor than that who is wealthy. Open borders says,”While the pro-poor distributional impacts are of particular interest to egalitarians, they are also important to utilitarians, because money at the margin means more to poor people than to rich people.” The value of money i believe changes from person to person. The actual dollar amount doesn’t change but the ideology behind money changes. You can show a dollar to a person making a decent amount of money, and then to a person who is living out on the streets. Did the amount of money change? Nope, but the meaning of that dollar changed, the homeless person could potentially eat for the day on a dollar yet to the other person a dollar is just one of few in their account. Of course not everyone thinks this way because many different things come into play, but I wanted to focus on the idea of a dollar rather than looking at the person’s thinking.

The main objections shown on Open borders are that, harm the functioning of the global economic, social, and political order; and that the non-human happiness is not being looked at. Where I can see the animal defense the other order one doesn’t make sense to me. However I believe that we make too much that perhaps this, “surplus” of people could help balance out the waste that is not consumed by us on a daily basis. I am sure that we as humans have tons of pounds of waste that could easily have been avoided if it was more distributed without the community. The order defense doesn’t make sense to me because the people coming into the land would still obey the laws that are in play.

Word Count:568