&gt; No defensible moral framework regards foreigners as less deserving of rights than people born in the right place at the right time.<p>In roughly the same way that no defensible moral framework says that you should feed your own child rather than every other child in the world. Or the same way that no defensible moral framework says you have more of a right to live in your own house than anyone else has to live in your house. Or in the same way that no moral framework says that you should take and keep the money which The Atlantic pays you for writing this article and spend it on yourself, instead of giving it to some random stranger in the street.<p>Perhaps you could argue that any sensible kind of morality requires you to believe that your own interests are entirely equivalent to everyone else&#x27;s, so you should never serve to protect your own interests. But I don&#x27;t think anyone on the entire planet believes this, on a practical level. And if you invent a moral system that nobody is actually going to follow, it&#x27;s a bad moral system, because the point of a moral system is that people should actually be able to follow it.<p>Instead, I choose to believe that yes, we have the right to serve our own interests and protect the privileges we were born with. In my case, that includes the privilege of being born in a rich first-world country that my ancestors built, as well as the individual privilege of living in this nice house which I bought. It&#x27;s very sad for those people born without these sorts of privileges (ie closer to our species&#x27; natural state) but I&#x27;m not about to give up what I have so that billions of others can... well, not have it too, because in an unlimited immigration world there <i>would</i> be no rich countries, just a series of war-riven shanty towns... but so they can have the satisfaction of bringing me down.<p>Instead of letting the whole world onto our little life raft &#x27;til it sinks, how about we start giving them useful advice on how to inflate their own life rafts?