Disclosure: I'm an EU national living in UK.

> What I was trying to point out is that making a moral defense for EU freedom of movement (as many remainers did) is basically impossible without being a hypocrite. There are, of course, other reasons to defend it.

Your logic is flawed. EU FoM is not a barrier to increase FoM by adding more countries to the FoM treaties. It is a barrier if you want to do so unilaterally: i.e. if the new FoM country doesn't meet the required criteria to join the FoM space. It's a shame because that might mean that country has a lack of human rights respect or civil liberties, so we make it more difficult for its citizens to escape... But that's why we should be mindful about refugees and asylum seekers.

Man, it's funny how some people argue that the EU is racist because of FoM (talk about twisted arguments) and then they don't want to get any refugees from non-white/non-slavic/non-catholic countries that are escaping literal hell.

Going back to FoM, one of the Brexiteers mantras was "Turkey is going to join the EU and we will get flooded!"; which would be another step in extending FoM to more countries.

Funnily enough it was the UK the one pushing for a fast Turkey accession... and in any case it's vox populi that ain't gonna happen in decades due to Turkey not meeting the requirements by a long shot.

> I find it an uncomfortable fact that almost all modern immigration policies judge people by where they happen to have been born rather than their personal qualities.

Yes, it's a shame we have to come down to that. However it seems that's the fastest way to approve FoM between countries and, you know, at least "it's not personal". I'm not trying to defend it and I wish we had something better (like FoM for all), but other systems have shown to be less fair:

https://medium.com/@rachelnabors/wtfuk-73009d5623b4

And if you're in the UK surely you can watch all those Aussie Border Control shows in Dave or one of those Freeview channels - an American dude flying to Oz with his GF for holidays was refused entry because he got caught with some pot 20 years before in the US. Also there was this Aussie dude that overstayed his UK tourist Visa by something like 14 years (no kidding!) and he was sent back to Australia effectively destroying his life (friends, partner, ...) - were any of those fair? I would argue "no", other people might say "yes" - I don't really know what's the right answer, but it's clear that's not easy to decide who gets in and who does not.

Individual qualities are also subjective and subjected to other influencing factors: I'm sure you have in mind a Visa points system.
What makes you think that that's the best system? Are we good at evaluating how "good" a person is? With that points system, would we still get unqualified EU labour to fill in jobs? If we don't, those factories might actually move to the country of origin of that cheap labour, throwing a sizeable % of British workers into the benefits system (and only a part of them would be able to get out - see Thatcher's years), putting a bigger strain into the welfare system. Wait, actually that might be the Tory plan after all, destroy the welfare system :)

> People have taken issue with me using the word racist (I still think it applies, even if we're not strictly talking about ethnicity), so what's the correct term? Nationality-ist?

IMHO "racist" perfectly conveys the message and it's only challenged by those who don't want to be tagged as "racist" while being so. You could get picky and use "xenophobic" which would be the 100% right word as far as I know, but I'm on your same side on this one: Arguing that racist is not the right word is an argument usually used by racists :) and pointless.