I had never, over a period of half a dozen years watching these cases, encountered a genuine case of citizen abuse of an alien spouse (which is not to say that it does not happen), but a bizarre instance of it has come to my attention and I feel an obligation to report it.

We are now one week into the strangest government shutdown I have ever seen. And because each of the two parties has different needs, it doesn't look like it's going anywhere fast.

Border Patrol agents are expected by their critics to overcome the damage that was done to these children during the many weeks of their travel, as often as not accompanied by parents and as a part of a smuggling load in the care of an indifferent coyote whose interest is in speed and not being detected. Where is the parental responsibility for this state of affairs?

What a border barrier (whatever it's called) does is block people out. Not all people all the time. But many. Tens of thousands. And if a wall does that, many of the other dysfunctions begin to ameliorate, buying the system time to heal itself.

The eight includes four who are not coming back next month, four with lots of Hispanic voters in their districts, and some in both categories.

The adoption of both the migration and refugee compacts this week concludes a two-year process that began with the 2016 New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants and is a historic victory for UN efforts to regulate migrant and refugee flows on a global level.

The Global Compact on Refugees was officially adopted today by the United Nations General Assembly in New York. The related but separate migration compact is expected to undergo the same process on Wednesday. This would conclude a two-year UN process, beginning with the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants in 2016, to regulate migrant and refugee flows on a global level.

Despite growing skepticism about the "Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration", the UN agreement was adopted this week at a conference in Morocco (despite the fact that 33 states did not participate). On Monday, the UN General Assembly will vote on a related but separate agreement, the "Global Compact for Refugees". Will those countries that chose not to commit to the migration compact do the same with the refugee one?

The United Nations "Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration" is to be officially endorsed in a couple of days in Morocco. The closer we are to the date, the less attractive the idea of global governance of migration sounds. The list of countries opposing the compact is growing. Since the United States' withdrawal last year, nine other countries (so far) have followed suit: the Dominican Republic, Australia, Israel, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Poland, and Austria.