6. 6. Liberal and conservative framing of immigration, affirmative action and multiculturalism.

Immigration

Within Strict Father morality (conservatives), - illegal immigrants are seen as lawbreakers ("illegals") who should be punished. People who hire them are just pursuing their self-interest, as they should, and so are doing nothing wrong.

- From the perspective of the Nation As Family metaphor, illegal immigrants are not citizens, hence they are not children in our family and we have no responsibility to take care of them.

From the perspective of Nurturant Parent morality (liberals), - illegal immigrants are powerless people with no immoral intent, they are seen as innocent children needing nurturance.

- Illegal immigrants are seen as innocent poor people looking for a better life who are often exploited, when they are lured or brought into the U.S. by employers who are willing to break the law to increase their profit. The enforcement of the law should, in such cases, focus on law-breaking employers.

- Illegal immigrants typically perform low-status tasks cheaply that citizens will not do for those wages: farm, sweatshop, and restaurant labor, housecleaning, childcare, gardening, odd jobs, and so on. They are a necessary part of the economy, keeping farm and garment-making profits high and food and clothing costs low.

- They increase the nation's tax base by permitting middle-class families to have two incomes and allowing many industries to make high profits that are subject to taxation.

- Out of fairness, they deserve to be compensated for their low pay by having their basic needs guaranteed.

Through the Nation As Family metaphor, they are seen as children who have been lured or brought into the national household and who contribute in a vital way to that national household. You don't throw such children out onto the street. It would be immoral.

Affirmative Action

Consevatives critisize affirmative action, liberals support.

Affirmative action looks immoral to conservatives, on the grounds that it gives preferential treatment to women and minorities.

- Any policy that gives people things they haven't earned is seen as immoral, because it lessens the incentive to be self-disciplined.

- Strict Father morality requires that competition between people not be impeded and promotes the right kind of person – a self-disciplined person, one who can set his own plans, make his own commitments and carry them out effectively.

The Nurturant Parent model: It is the job of a nurturant parent to see that the children in the family treat each other fairly.

- In the Nation As Family metaphor, that becomes: the responsibility of the government is to guarantee fair treatment of people who have been subject to discrimination – women, nonwhites, and ethnic minorities.

- Liberals further adopt the Group As Individual metaphor that defines collective action and collective rights. It allows considerations of fairness to individuals to apply to groups.

- Liberals offer 2 reasons for such a group focus:

1) phenomenon of stereotyping

- People judge all the members of a class in terms of a stereotypical image.

For example, women may still be seen fundamentally as housewives whose skills are best suited to homemaking, or who are unable to do rigorous logical thinking. This could result in a woman being judged less qualified than a man without the person doing the judging even being aware of his prejudice. Affirmative action is a means for remedying unfairness for whole groups over time.

- At the same time a stereotype helps white males start with an advantage. Affirmative action can help make things closer to even, giving a chance to a better, or equally well qualified, woman or nonwhite, when they would otherwise be eliminated because of the white males' stereotype advantage.

2) different subcultures, different value systems

- White men have a different subculture with different forms of discourse and a different value system than white women. The same goes for other cultural groups.

- At present white men hold top positions, they are the ones doing the judging. But the values by which they judge will almost inevitably be the largely unconscious values of their own subculture.

For example, men may not value certain skills that women have and men tend to lack. As a result, their "honest judgment" may be discriminatory.

Treating women as a group and measuring fairness by the group over time is one way of overcoming the implicit advantage that white men have – the subculture advantage.

Under affirmative action, white men still have advantages they don't even know they have: stereotype-advantages and subculture-advantages.

Multiculturalism

Strict Father morality says about other moral and cultural systems that they are immoral.

- If they do not give primacy to moral strength, they promote moral weakness, which is a form of immorality.

- They are also immoral if they blur the strict moral boundaries of Strict Father morality, or challenge the moral authority of Strict Father morality, or challenge the Moral Order of our society.

For this reason, conservatives tend to be against multiculturalism, (which seeks tolerance for cultural diversity and many other forms of morality). To conservatives, forms of morality other than their own are not moral and therefore not to be tolerated.

Liberals are for multiculturalism.

Nurturant Parent morality, on the other hand, has a very different view of diversity.

- Since a nurturant parent gives equal priority to all his or her children, and since children necessarily have differences among them, all those differences have to be respected and toleration is required.

- each child has something different to contribute to the family.

Applying the Nation As Family metaphor, diversity in a nation is positive and toleration is required.