Rick Santorum showed surprising strength in the 2012 primaries and it is widely believed he is going to run again.  The Pennsylvania Republican will certainly shift the GOP debate on immigration in the right direction with this pro-American worker platform he recently released [An immigration policy for hard working Americans, by Rick Santorum, Breitbart, May 6, 2015]

The key points:

• Secure the border, build a fence on the Israeli model, and strengthen the Border Patrol
• Never let unaccompanied minors or asylum seekers move from the border and provide resources to judge cases right away and deport them
• Mandate E-Verify
• End birthright citizenship
• Reduce LEGAL immigration (from about 1.1 million a year to 750,000)

What jumps out from this plan is it shows serious reflection and actual research of the illegal immigration problem.  All too often, many of the leading Republican candidates (or for that matter, Beltway Right "intellectuals") show no evidence of ever having thought about immigration as a policy issue.  Even when candidates occasionally do something good (like when Rand Paul spoke against birthright citizenship), it seems like they are just agreeing with the last person they spoke to.

Here, Santorum makes an explicit appeal to the Israelis as a model to follow when it comes to immigration, has practical solutions for drying up the jobs market for illegals, and actually provides a way to deal with the endless waves of unaccompanied minors besieging the southern border.

However, the best part is how Santorum frames this issue as a matter of economic justice.

For the past decade-plus, wages for the 74 percent of Americans who don’t have college degrees have been stagnant, and median income has fallen, in part because of a combination of millions of illegal immigrants and new legal immigrants coming to this country per year.

The impact of this economic stagnation has struck native-born African Americans and Hispanics harder than whites.  Since 2000, the employment rate for native-born African Americans has worsened by 9.2 percent and Hispanics by 7.7 percent, while employment for whites has worsened by 6.1 percent. Granting amnesty only exacerbates this problem.

Santorum does not have a perfect record on this issue and only time will tell if he sticks to his guns here. But if he can shift the debate on immigration within the GOP, he'll have rendered his party and country a great service.