> it paints a picture of certain places as belonging to a certain group of people by natural right rather than by a more contingent or accidental mechanism If

> it paints a picture of certain places as belonging to a certain group of people by natural right rather than by a more contingent or accidental mechanism If my ancestors built a place, and raised their families there to continue taking care of it for generations, in what sense does it not belong to me and my extended family? Nothing about that process was "accidental", though it may have some factor of "randomness" about it depending on your personal epistemology. > I think it's only a very short distance from that kind of argument to the argument that many use to suggest that immigrants fleeing dangerous and awful places are an infestation to be eliminated. You've skipped a thousand steps. When the caretakers of a place welcome people in, and then discover they pose a problem, it's not unreasonable for them to wish to mitigate the issue. If this means that an unlimited number of refugees or immigrants cannot be accepted because maintaining the same standard of living would be impossible, it is not unreasonable to refuse new entrants. By no means are we beholden to support every other human being, even if we empathize for their plight. > The fact that some groups of people find themselves in possession of a place or a resource that others appreciate or even covet does not convey on them some kind of moral superiority over the rest of humanity. It's not moral superiority; it's moral duty, to understand and uphold the works of the past that have lead to greatness. Failure to do so could mean seeing beautiful things destroyed, replaced by the same chaos and fear that people are already fleeing. > I say this as someone who hates to travel Well, maybe if you saw more of the world, and saw what people are trying to protect (e.g. in Europe), and got a greater sense of what it means to be a people (as opposed to the atomized, decultured masses in North America)... maybe you might understand why someone would seek to preserve something. It makes sense that you don't care about preserving your local strip mall / walmart / home depot. It's quite another thing to care about preserving Notre Dame and such.