There is a good and perfectly natural reason to favor people from our own country: they have to live under the same system as us. They have skin in the game on

There is a good and perfectly natural reason to favor people from our own country: they have to live under the same system as us. They have skin in the game on our team. Someone acting in our country but operating out of a different one can exploit the difference in rules to our detriment (e.g. a Chinese company competing in Western markets, but with the finger of state backing pushing on the scales). On a large enough scale it's a threat to democracy etc. if our group decides that groups no longer matter, and another group doesn't. You can iteratively, conservatively try to approach an equilibrium where borders and divisions no longer matter and all of humanity joins together in enlightenment. That seems to be the general direction we're going and it's a good thing. What you can't do is unilaterally make a cooperative system out of a competitive one. If you go all at once by yourself you just get killed. Nationality is a big (and in some cases literal) Chesterton's Fence. It is somewhat arbitrary, but that doesn't make it meaningless.