Thompson’s new immigration platform is more hawkish than I expected. Not only does he understand the attrition argument, but his specifics are pretty good too: mandatory electronic verification of all new hires, enable Social Security cooperation with immigration authorities, withhold federal funding from sanctuary cities. And in what seems to be a first for a major presidential candidate, he calls for ending chain migration by discontinuing all family-related immigration except for the spouses and minor children of American citizens (as well as eliminating the visa lottery). If all other categories remained the same, such changes would have reduced the legal immigration in 2006 by nearly 400,000, from nearly 1.3 million to a little under 900,000. That’s still way too high, but it’s moving in the right direction.