why are geographically proximate people of more moral worth? It gets worse when you take the marginal utility of money into account. Capitalism has this wonderful feature where industry goes and sets up shop wherever people have it worst off because their labor is the cheapest. This infrastructure improves the crappy areas until it is no longer the worst, repeat. The world has thus been ratcheting itself out of extreme poverty since the industrial revolution.
> why are geographically proximate people of more moral worth?
This seems to be the implicit assumption whenever certain segments of the political class bemoan jobs being "shipped overseas". On a local/national scale, inequality does increase as unskilled workers face international competition. But on a global scale, inequality actually decreases as those living in the world's poorest countries see their incomes go up.
In this case at least, a likely explanation for why geographically proximate workers are deemed more worthy is that they are part of the relevant political constituency and the foreign workers are not.
The idea of politics at a local level, rather than having a single top down international government is that assuming everyone has good government then everyone's needs are advocated for equally.
So it's not so much that other workers are less worthy, it is that they should have their own representative to argue for them. If my representative is spending his/her time advocating for someone else then I am getting an unfair deal.
This is apparent in Britain over the EU debate as many believe that membership of the EU is preventing British politicians from considering the best interests of Britain whilst others advocate that EU membership is necessary for Britain to have any say at all.
