It's inherent tribal biases that are essentially a product of evolution and are hard to dispel. People are inherently predisposed to feel more compassion for those they perceive as more like themselves. These traits were evolutionarily useful in a non-global society where protecting your own tribe and being distrustful of outsiders kept one alive. We're no longer in that situation, but evolution is a slower process than human technological advancement, and our frontal lobes just have not caught up to us.
I would suggest that this is tendency is morally wrong, in the sense that we should not act according to meaningless differences, but it's something that one needs to recognize in order to make an effort to get past it.
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"The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
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