In a piece about popular our-own-first reasoning, Jerusalem Demsas argues that having lived somewhere longer does not make you more deserving of “ordinary respect, fair treatment, human rights, or a seat at the combination Starbucks-Barnes & Noble.”
On the moral poverty of the belief that “accidents of birth are a just way of allocating rights,” we agree. But her conflation of national partiality with racial exclusion forecloses a more tractable challenge to real American institutions that combine co-national preference with antiracism.
In 2026, HUD says it is trying to “put the American people first” in federally assisted housing, and has ordered housing authorities to verify citizenship or immigration status. The same agency enforces the Fair Housing Act against racial discrimination.
Although it is possible to nutpick, Republican-led institutions can and do put Black Americans inside the moral circle of concern while excluding Ukrainians and other white Europeans from welfare benefits that give preference to citizens.
People differ quite widely in how much moral weight they assign to national membership. “I feel stronger obligations to my countrymen” describes a preference of some—called parochial altruism—that is commonly used to organize a political faction.
Before we can ask whether there are good moral arguments for drawing the circle of special obligation around the nation, analysts have to separate national preference from allegations of racial motive that are often unsupported and facially false.
Otherwise the question more relevant to today’s actually existing multiracial societies never gets asked. Is national membership itself a morally legitimate basis for treating one person’s claim as stronger than another’s?