As you might imagine, New Jersey governor and Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie caught flakk over the weekend for saying we should track immigrants like FedEx packages.
Not so fast, Christie says. He didn't actually mean exactly what he's saying again now.
"I don’t mean people are packages, so let’s not be ridiculous,” the New Jersey governor told an interviewer on Fox News Sunday who pointed out that foreigners do not have labels on their wrists.
"This is once again a situation where the private sector laps us in the government with the use of technology," Christie said. "We should bring in the folks from FedEx to use the technology to be able to do it. There’s nothing wrong with that."
'I don't mean people are packages but we should track them like packages.'
Here's what Christie originally said:
"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," Christie said, speaking at a VFW hall in New Hampshire Saturday morning. "Yet we let people come to this country with visas, and the minute they come in, we lose track of them." [...]
"We need to have a system that tracks you from the moment you come in, and then when your time is up, we go get you and tap you on the shoulder and say, 'Excuse me, thanks for coming, time to go,'" Christie said.
I see no other way to interpret this than to compare undocumented immigrants to FedEx packages.
Obviously, doing so would require tagging them somehow.
Would Chris Christie prefer branding immigrants with bar codes or implanting them with RFID tags?