As Christmas approached, Guatemala City resident Adelaida Gonzalez, 37, was one of 8,500 migrants waiting at the U.S. border in Tijuana, Mexico. Gonzalez and her 15-year-old son were part of the latest migrant caravan, but she now regrets not staying in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas and taking the work government authorities offered there: “We were never told along the way that it would be this hard.”

Here’s an abridged Chapter 1 of Freedom, Justice, and Hope: Toward a Strategy for the Poor and the Oppressed (Crossway, 1988). I wrote the full version a long time ago as a member of the Villars Committee, which led a partly successful drive to change thinking about international relief and development. The same old, same old still holds significant sway in practice, but some U.S. programs show understanding that person-to-person and church-to-church aid is usually far more effective than government-to-government grants.

The United States Department of Agriculture proposed a rule last month to make states enforce work requirements in their food stamps programs, after similar changes were dropped from the farm bill passed by Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump.

This year the immigration debate took center stage in the United States. Stories flooded the news media all year describing scenes of children being separated from parents and migrants being taken to detention. President Donald Trump’s strong rhetoric inflamed the already emotional issue. The U.S. government enacted policies designed to show compassion to prisoners, opioid addicts, and sex trafficking victims. Several state governments changed their laws to try to help panhandlers and homeless people.

INDIANAPOLIS—Nearly 20 years ago, WORLD editor in chief Marvin Olasky put Indianapolis on the map with a chapter about the city in his book Compassionate Conservatism, endorsed by then-Gov. George W. Bush of Texas.

AUSTIN, Texas—Alan Graham started the Community First! Village in Austin, Texas, three years ago as a Christian alternative to the Housing First model. Housing First, a strategy widely used by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, provides housing to the homeless before addressing problems like drug addiction or mental illness. Research suggests the rapid rehousing strategy does not lead to long-term housing security, but that hasn’t stopped the federal government from spending hundreds of millions of dollars on it.

On Nov. 23, Samuel Oliver-Bruno emerged from the basement of the City Well United Methodist Church in Durham, N.C., for the first time in 11 months. A small crowd of church members accompanied the Mexican national to an appointment with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), where he was arrested and later deported.