More on the moral basis for limiting immigration and not offshoring American jobs

In my first post on this subject, I wrote this:

It is moral to give preferences to in-groups over outsiders, nuclear family over extended family, family over other community members, members of one's religion, political party, union, or other organization over non-members, tested and loyal members over applicants and probationary members, etc.  Neither our civilization nor even our species can survive without cohesive groups whose members are loyal to and support each other to the partial or total exclusion of others.  The ability to form and maintain groups of composition, function, and commitment appropriate to life's difficulties, perils, and threats is fundamental. 

In a later post, I pointed to science suggesting there is a neurological cause—or at least a process—for unconsciously favoring in-group members, and other science suggesting a survival advantage to favoring in-groups in that natural selection may conserve and spread genes that are helpful to the group but not to individual group members.

Now, let's look at the other side of the argument and consider the implications: Let's suppose Americans do have a moral obligation to share with poverty-stricken or merely less-fortunate Chindians by enduring the joblessness and stagnant and declining wages that globalization causes in America. If that's true, must it not also be true that well-off Americans have on obligation to take less so that not-so-well-off Americans can have more? Both must be correct moral statements, or neither must be. There is no valid argument that low- and middle-income Americans have a moral duty to share with Chindians, but high-income Americans have no moral duty to share with low- and middle-income Americans, is there? And yet what has actually happened in America in recent decades, especially in the last ten years is that low- and middle-income Americans have shared with the Chindians and the high-income Americans have shared with nobody but have benefitted from a rising level of income inequality last seen in America in 1929.

And BTW, inequality in America is now higher than for any other long-term OECD member but Mexico and Turkey. From Catherine Rampell, Inequality Rising Across the Developed World.

Update on Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 12:54PM by Skeptic

David Brooks' column today, Nice Guys Finish First, points out evidence that humans, unlike other primates, have a tendency to cooperation and altruism that moderates our selfish genes. This tendency fosters cohesive and effective groups and gives humans an evolutionary advantage. He suggests that these social tendencies are the source of ethics, emotion, morality, and religion. Whether it's genetic or not, our ability to form and maintain groups is indispensible to having an advanced economy--we can't do that if we cooperate with nobody, or if we try to cooperate with everybody to the same degree.