Democratic nations should significantly restrict immigration to protect national security and cultural cohesion.

This debate on immigration restrictions revealed a stark asymmetry in evidentiary standards and argumentative rigor. Pro opened with a security-centric narrative emphasizing vetting failures and cultural fragmentation, while Con countered with data-driven arguments on economic integration and comparative terrorism statistics.

The decisive turning point occurred in Round 2, where Con exposed critical flaws in Pro's statistical reasoning. Pro cited raw terror incident numbers without addressing base rates—a fallacy of composition that Con identified and systematically dismantled. By demonstrating that native-born populations account for disproportionate rates of terrorist activities when controlling for population size, Con neutralized Pro's primary security justification. Pro's failure to rebut this base rate correction in subsequent rounds proved fatal; instead, Pro pivoted to DHS audit reports on vetting gaps, but committed a false dichotomy by assuming administrative gaps necessitated significant restrictions rather than targeted reforms.

Con's evidence quality significantly outpaced Pro's, drawing from peer-reviewed longitudinal studies on immigrant economic integration and meta-analyses of radicalization pathways, whereas Pro relied heavily on government audit reports and isolated case studies without establishing statistical significance. However, Con was not without flaws; their dismissal of cultural cohesion concerns occasionally lapsed into argumentum ad populum, assuming that because multicultural societies exist, they function optimally—a claim Con supported with correlation-heavy data but failed to establish causation for democratic stability specifically.

Pro demonstrated rhetorical improvement across rounds (scores climbing from 4.9 to 6.1), particularly in Round 4's effective reframing away from "open borders" extremism. However, Pro's persistent reliance on fear-based appeals and failure to engage Con's specific rebuttals regarding integration efficacy left their core thesis underdeveloped. The final differential (26.9 to 22.2) reflects Con's consistent superiority in logical reasoning and evidence quality, though the modest 59% confidence indicates that Pro's sovereignty arguments, while empirically weak, touched on legitimate theoretical tensions in democratic theory that Con addressed only superficially.