LACONIA, N.H. — Chris Christie said Saturday that if elected president, he will track undocumented immigrants like FedEx packages.
“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,” the New Jersey governor said at a town hall event here.
Christie added that while FedEx can track boxes, the U.S. can’t track undocumented immigrants.
“You go online and at any moment, FedEx can tell you where that package is,” he said. “Yet we let people come into this country with visas, and the minute they come in, we lose track of them.”
Christie added, “We need to have a system that tracks you from the moment you come in and then when your time is up,” he said. “However long your visa is, then we go get you and tap you on the shoulder and say, ‘Excuse me, it’s time to go.'”
Smith is the father of Samantha Smith, a Christie spokeswoman.
Christie added that conversations about “anchor babies” make the Republican Party look unfairly hostile to immigrants.
“The entire conversation about ‘anchor babies’ is a distraction that makes us sound like we’re anti-immigrant, and we’re not,” he said. “Our party is not that way. We want people to do it legally. Do it the right way.”
Christie made it clear in an interview on “Fox News Sunday” that he was not equating people to packages.
“They’re not,” he said, responding to a question. “But what my point was, was this is once again a situation where the private sector laps us in the government with the use of technology.
Christie is not the first politician to cite FedEx as a model for addressing illegal immigration. Virginia Rep. Barbara Comstock and Newt Gingrich have made similar suggestions in the past.