No, that doesn't mean you're xenophobic. It just means you think that people from other countries are less deserving of job opportunities than people from your country. It's still not a quality I share or respect, but it's not xenophobia.
It just means you think that people from other countries
are less deserving of job opportunities than people from
your country.
It's very fashionable to virtue signal that you have no loyalty to your country and that we should all live under a one world government.
I do not share that wish. I love that we do not have a mono-culture of government in the world, but have 195 different decentralized experiments happening on how to best run the world. I would hate to have a single experiment running with nowhere to look to or flee to, if it all goes awry.
But I live in one of those 195 experiments, and my fellows that share that with me, my countrymen, I support above the other 194. That's called being human.
Of course I don't deny personally valuing my family and friends more than strangers, but that doesn't mean I think they fundamentally are more deserving of jobs than strangers. I would personally help a friend get a job before I would help a stranger, but I still think that Americans are no more deserving of jobs than non-Americans, and I don't believe that is a contradiction.
Edit: I also don't think we should be under a one-world government, and I don't see how that follows.
I am fairly convinced that economic protectionism is bad for economic growth, particularly in the long run. And even if I'm a direct beneficiary of a certain protectionist policy, I'd like to think I will oppose it, because it's essentially equivalent to the government taking resources from a non-protected job sector and giving them to the protected job sector.
Nice try, but nationalism is not an intrinsic trait of being a human.
This sort of tactical nihilism is honestly pretty confusing to me. Borders, whether national, ideological, social, tribal, linguistic, etc. always have some level of arbitrariness to them, and yet they still represent useful categories. The house door that you lock every evening is merely a collection of arbitrary atoms arranged to separate what you imagine to be your property from others. In the framework of nations, the idea of treating citizens differently from non-citizens as being "discrimination" is an odd one. A country belongs to its people; it doesn't belong to those across the arbitrary border. We all make (sometimes arbitrary) restrictions on access to that which we value; humans who don't do that usually end up losing them to those who do.
That has always been my aversion to nationalism, because to me it occupies the second group in trying not only create loyalty, but much like the company, try to usurp natural loyalty. The power of which I've seen a family member go into nationalism's deep end and strain our relationship with them because I didn't agree.
What's the point of even having a country if citizens aren't prioritized over non-citizens? What's the point of banding together as a nation if you don't engage in policy that helps one another? I don't feel just as entitled to a job in Japan as a Japanese citizen. Do you advocate for one world government or something?
For jobs? We're talking about welcoming immigrants into the country to work. My opinion doesn't extend to every possible way that a nation can prioritize its own citizens. If, for instance, there's an American citizen involved in some incident in another country (plane crash, terrorist attack, unjust arrest, etc.), of course I expect the USA to prioritize that. I also expect the USA to prioritize its own economy, infrastructure, education, etc. (although I think that is for the benefit of all legal residents, not just "citizens").
Are you aware that there are negatives to this, or just that they're not important to you?