[philwelch]

I think it's natural to care about people who are closer to you or more similar to you. But that doesn't make it right, because that exact same tendency is what drives racism. And it's hard to say the moral effects are any different when you compare what poverty looks like in China or Bangladesh to what poverty looks like in America. If you start with the premise that all human life has the same value, then the difference between subsistence farming and a sweatshop job in East Asia is a much bigger improvement than you could ever create in the United States.

This kind of selective altruism, where you care about other Americans so much that you'd make comparatively marginal improvements to their lives instead of making drastic improvements to the life of a foreigner, is the moral equivalent of racism.