A few days ago, Chris Christie spouted (pun intended) that he would hire Fred Smith - founder of FeDex - to teach the government how to track people overstaying their visas. My diary on that subject is here.
That led to a lot of speculation that he was planning on bar-coding all non-immigrants who enter the country - after all, that's how FeDex does it, right?
Well, today the big guy (pun intended) from New Jersey expounded on his idea:
"I don't mean people are packages," Christie said in an interview on Fox News. "We should use biometric technology to track people who come as visitors. They are not immigrants, they are not immigrating here. They are here to visit for a period of time, get an education or do something we permit them to do to visit our country, and we should track those people and they should not stay over the period of time they do."
"People complain about the 11 million [undocumented immigrants in the U.S.]. Well, 40 percent of those 11 million are here not because they snuck over the southern border -- which we spend a lot of time talking about -- but because we let them in through an airport and decided we do not need to track them anymore," the governor went on. "This is not treating people like packages. I'm not saying put bar codes on people -- that is ridiculous. But we need to use technology in order to be able to secure the border."
Christie said he envisioned a system similar to the one that law enforcement authorities use to track criminals by their fingerprints. The proposed system would issue a red flag if someone with an expired visa used their ID to rent a car or take a flight, for example.
"The technology exists. I think you can do it with fingerprint technology," Christie said. "Government doesn't do this."
So, how did he do? Let's take a look.
First, let me reiterate that the claim of '40 percent of those 11 million are here not because they snuck over the southern border' is very soft, not provable, and not backed up by any good data. I won't hit poor Chris on that one, because it's getting a lot of use these days, and is becoming accepted, at least for the sake of discussions like this. The precise number isn't important, IMHO.
Also, I'm curious why Christie insisted that Fred Smith, whose business is built on bar-codes on packages, as his pre-eminent expert to fix government's problem. Is he also a fingerprint expert? An expert on large, unwieldy databases? Sounds fishy.
Here's a few problems I have with Christie's concept (I won't call it a plan):
1. We're talking about a whole lot of tracking:
In addition to 9.9 million non-immigrant visas issued last year, there were almost 75 million non-visa legal border crossings. Citizens of 38 countries don't need a visa to enter for tourism or business. All of these people can enter and leave the country as often as they like. So we're talking about a huge database, and we know how the government does with that kind of stuff.
2. We currently don't track people leaving the country.
Certainly, doing it is possible, but it's going to be a pretty big (and expensive) chore. While parts of it could be automated, it will take a lot of additional people and large amounts of space in the airports and other border crossing points.
3. Fingerprints required to rent a car or take a flight..... and what else?
Here we start descending into the police state nightmare, because we're going to require every airline ticket counter and rent-a-car booth to not only take everyone's fingerprints, but also be connected - in real time - into our massive database described above. Everybody will have to be checked, unless we can train the ticket clerks to identify visa-overstayers by sight. I don't think Christie has a good profile of the typical visa-overstayer - I doubt they fly around and rent cars a whole lot. So we'll expand this to bus terminals, convenience stores, Home Depot parking lots..... anywhere else?
This is a huge stride down the slippery slope to the kind of 'fingerprint required to cross the street' police state that doesn't get a whole lot of support in this country.
4. Visa-overstaying isn't a crime, it's a civil offense.
Just like crossing the border without papers. A Republican president with a friendly Congress wouldn't have trouble changing this one, but it is a big change.
5. Somebody's got to arrest, house and process all those people.
I'm sure Sheriff Joe would love to have the contract, but most localities aren't big on this kind of thing - and they avoid getting involved in immigration matters now.
6. There's going to be a lot of mistakes made.
And everyone of those mistaken visa-overstayers is going to be pretty pissed off about spending a few nights in jail until they can find a way to set things straight. It won't take too many tourist families from Germany reporting about the lousy jails in West Virginia - or anywhere else - they were forced to stay in for a week to pretty well kill tourism from that country. Good business for lawyers, though.
7. All of the 4.4 million visa-overstayers Christie is talking about are already here!
That's 40% of the 11 million undocumented immigrants he talks about. None of them have fingerprints on file, so this new system won't help find or deport them. So we're talking about spending billions on a far-less-than-perfect system without having any good idea just how many people it will actually catch and remove from the country.
There's plenty more issues with Christie's idea, but I'm getting nauseous writing about it. I invite commenters to add to the list.
On top of all of these issues, the overwhelmingly vast majority of these visa-overstayers are productive members of our society, working and paying taxes, raising their children in a far better place than they came from.
I'm not a big Jeb! fan, but I totally agree with him when he describes illegal immigration as an 'act of love'. What we're doing to these poor people now - locking them up, deporting them in large numbers, treating them like criminals - is inhumane.
It sickens me to listen to these clown-car idiots try to outdo each other for the prize of biggest asshole in dealing with people who don't look like us.
Cheers.