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Huh? Now it's virtue signaling to say that people from other countries deserve the same opportunities as people from my country?

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.

The argument is that if the American government doesn't enact policies that protect and favor Americans, but rather enacts policies that equally protect and favor everyone in the world, then it is effectively acting as a world government or an international charity.

Well, we're talking specifically about the USA's own policies for immigrants entering the USA and working. I have different opinions if we're talking about military and foreign policy.

Because over the long run policies adopted by your country should be scoped to help the members of your country. If politicians/corporations can make a decision that harms our young, and then dig us out by saying there should be a fair playing ground with foreigners, then the consequences of those decisions are externalized.

> Because over the long run policies adopted by your country should be scoped to help the members of your country.

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.

> 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.

Nice try, but nationalism is not an intrinsic trait of being a human.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_favoritism#Biological...

Even admitting biological propensity, is that really a quality to aspire to at the level of a nation-state? Is that how we should define and measure our "human-ness"?

And even if it were, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

How do you feel about loyalty based on race? Is there a difference between race-based loyalty and citizenship-based loyalty?

To discriminate against someone born across a completely imaginary and arbitrarily drawn line is being human? Huh?

It is, but now we know better.

Ingroup/outgroup dynamics are a pretty deeply-rooted aspect of human social behavior. Maybe it doesn't always manifest itself in the form of a Westphalian nation-state, but it does point to something deep inside us that we manifest at various levels.

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.

I haven't seen anyone in this thread argue for dissolving borders or having a single world government (although a few people have been arguing vehemently against it). It's perfectly reasonable to support national borders with strong checks for safety, while still supporting an extremely welcoming immigrant worker policy.

Is no one going to challenge your first part? You mention family, neighbors, and company and completely ignored one of these is not like the others. Someone that has loyalty to family and friends is socially competent, but someone loyal to a company these days is just a sucker.

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.

Right? What harm has nationalism ever caused?