Fallacy: The Appeal to the Foreign
No, it’s not about asking a stranger for help. It occurs when a person reasons as such: “X is better than y merely because x is foreign (i.e., from another country, culture, etc.) and y is not” in cases in which being foreign is wholly irrelevant to the values of the items compared. This fallacy is like the appeal to familiarity, but instead of a bias in favor of the familiar, it is a bias against the domestic and toward what is exotic and/or distant.
The appeal to the foreign and the appeal to familiarity fallacies are rarely discussed in logic, so far as I can see, but they are somewhat common (as are all fallacies, to some degree). These mistakes in reasoning are similar to what I call the Golden Age fallacy, humorously represented in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. A person commits this fallacy when he reasons that the past (or present, or future) is the best time to live merely because it is the past (present, future). The Golden Age fallacy involves a temporal bias. The appeal to the foreign and the appeal to familiarity fallacies involve a spatial and/or cultural bias.