Chris Christie Wants to Track Immigrants Like 'FedEx Packages'
Republican presidential hopeful and New Jersey governor Chris Christie made an unusual analogy to explain how he would combat undocumented immigration at a campaign stop over the weekend: Christie said he would track immigrants like FedEx packages.
More than that, Christie said he would actually ask FedEx for help to create the tracking 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," said Christie at a campaign event in Laconia, New Hampshire on Saturday, according to The Guardian. "Yet we let people come to this country with visas, and the minute they come in, we lose track of them," continued Christie.
"We need to have a system that tracks you from the moment you come in, and then when your time is up," he added, "however long your visa is, then we go get you."
"We tap you on the shoulder and say, 'Excuse me, thanks for coming. Time to go,'" said Christie.
Christie said he would accomplish this by enlisting the help of Fred Smith, chief of FedEx, and according to CNN, the father of one of his campaign's spokeswomen, Samantha Smith.
"I'm going to have Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx, come work for the government for three months. Just come for three months to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and show these people," said Christie. FedEx did not comment on the proposal.
Since Donald Trump stormed the Republican primary preseason, putting immigration out front as his top issue, other challengers for the GOP's presidential nomination have followed suit -- both in their focus and in their style.
Christie's harsher tone, ostensibly comparing immigrants to parcels, is the most recent example.
However, Christie also took pains to distance himself from the more controversial topics that have given Trump so much attention.
For example, the FedEx comment was part of a unique angle Christie's campaign has taken on the immigration issue, focusing less on building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and more on immigrants overstaying their visas, which Christie said was the source of 40 percent of illegal immigrants in the country.
Though he called for re-examining birthright citizenship earlier in the summer, Christie also distanced himself from the recent Trump-led GOP focus on so-called "anchor babies" -- the controversial name given to children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants who become citizens by birthright, due to the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
"The entire conversation about 'anchor babies' is a distraction that makes us sound like we're anti-immigrant, and we're not," said Christie. "Our party is not that way. We want people to do it legally. Do it the right way."