It seems that the competition for stupidest immigration idea - recently dominated by wanna-be Dear Leader Donald Trump - has started attracting others. Enter Chris 'Remember Me?' Christie.
At a town hall in New Hampshire (where he's practically been living, it seems) big Chris explained his plan this way:
"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.
"We need to have a system that tracks you from the moment you come in and then when your time is up, 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.'"
OK, ponder that while you tiptoe past the exploding croissant. Muted chuckles are acceptable, belly laughs will be considered a bit crass.
Firstly, let's look at the Fred Smith reference. I think Christie used it because The Donald always throws around Carl Icahn's name. You know, government is just like business, so here's this fantastic brand-new idea: let's put businessmen in charge of pieces of our government. Funny that nobody ever thought about that idea before, eh?
Fred Smith is an American success story, although no more self-made than Trump himself (both inherited fortunes). As I recall, his premise for Fedex was basically that by using a central hub (he chose Memphis), it would be possible to make a profit by shipping overnight packages to most places in the USA. It worked, he got rich, we got FeDex, and the USPS got screwed.
The FeDex system works because every package has a bar code on it, and every time a FeDex employee touches the package, the bar code gets scanned. That means the package's status is always known. So how would this apply to non-immigrant visitors to the USA?
Fun fact: the State Department issued 9,932,480 NON-immigrant visas in 2014.
This means that about 27,200 people enter the USA with non-immigrant visas every DAY and, more importantly, about 27,200 people are supposed to LEAVE every day as well.
We don't know how many illegal immigrants enter the country each year, but since the total population seems somewhat stable and deportations are around 400,000 per year, it's logical to me to estimate entries around 400,000.
The figure of 40% of illegal immigrants being non-resident visa over-stays isn't provable, but since it has been used by both Chris Christie and Jorge Ramos (and denied as being possible by The Donald) let's use it for the sake of argument.
This means that 160,000 (40% of 400,000) illegal immigrants - that's 438 per day - are overstaying their visa.
OK, Fred Smith, that's your challenge: keep track of the 27,000+ non-immigrant visitors who legally enter the USA every day - there may be more than 2,000,000 of them in the country at any given time (it includes students and temporary workers) - then find and tap on the shoulder the 438 who have overstayed.
Oh, and one more thing: you can't tattoo bar-codes on everyone who enters the country.
And you can't put RFID chips under their skins (like my cat has).
I suppose you could hire a few hundred thousand people to follow all those visitors around... sounds like a super small-government, conservative idea to me.
Errrr, Fred..... Fred? Where are you going? President Christie said you could take care of this, it would be a snap for you!
What do you mean, 'people aren't packages'?