Supporting Illegal Immigration: Is It Compassion Or Its Opposite?

The media relentlessly focus on those coming to America, without regard for those Americans hurt by this influx of foreign labor.

Meda Parameswara Reddy | October 23, 2026

In 1982, a year after earning my doctorate in organic chemistry at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, I spent an anxious day at the U.S. consulate in Chennai, waiting to learn whether I would receive a J-1 visa to work at Johns Hopkins University as an exchange scientist. Several of my friends had been refused. I was approved, and I have never forgotten that day.

Becoming a permanent resident took about five more years. My employer had to advertise the job, and my lawyer and I had to document why no American applicant met the requirements. Only then did the government let me stay. I resented the paperwork then. I respect it now. It existed to protect American workers, people I would never meet, from a newcomer willing to work for less.

That is the protection illegal immigration tears down, and it is the part of the story the loudest voices for “compassion” at the border never mention.

Compassion with one eye closed

Advocates of lax enforcement speak as if compassion points in only one direction, toward the migrant. But every illegally hired worker potentially competes for a job an American could have held, at a wage an American must now match. Compassion that sees only one person in that transaction is not compassion. It is selective sympathy, and someone else pays for........

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