Republican presidential candidates apparently are in a feverish race to show how extreme they can be, and thus somehow grab headlines away from the media vortex that is Donald Trump. Chris Christie is the latest. He proposes to welcome legal immigrants to our country by somehow branding them, then monitoring them like a Fedex package. Somehow he thinks Fedex will be happy to do this for the government. No word yet on whether tourists visiting from other countries will be required to enjoy our freedom and democracy by being constantly tracked, but I’m guessing yes.
Fedex of course has relatively few locations. Packages are scanned at them. The Mouth from Jersey proposes that potentially millions of scanning stations be set up nationwide so the government could know that a legal immigrant went to a subway in Manhattan for lunch. This crucial piece of information could certainly help prevent, oh wait, it wouldn’t really help prevent much of anything would it. But hey, once such a system was in place then it would be simple enough to mandate that US citizens must use it too, all to protect us of course.
Chris Christie, speaking at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire on Saturday, compared legal immigrants to FedEx packages, arguing they should be tracked continuously by the government. Christie even promised to bring in FedEx founder Fred Smith to set up the system.
“At any moment, FedEx can tell you where that package is. It’s on the truck. It’s at the station. It’s on the airplane. Yet we let people come to this country with visas, and the minute they come in, we lose track of them,” Christie said.