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.
FedEx tracks its packages so efficiently by affixing a bar code to every package and scanning them at regular intervals.
Martin O’Malley’s campaign criticized the remarks as “dehumanizing.”
Donald Trump has taken a commanding lead in the Republican presidential primary with an extremely hard line on immigration. The other candidates have scrambled to follow his lead — embracing the slur “anchor babies,” rejecting birthright citizenship and supporting Trump’s proposal for a wall across the entire southern border.
Christie previously supported a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. When he started running for President, he reversed his position. His remarks today appear to be an effort to further toughen up his rhetoric on the issue.