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Chris Christie Proposes Tracking Immigrants the Way FedEx Tracks Packages

PolygamousRanchKid submits the news that New Jersey governor (and Republican presidential candidate) Chris Christie said yesterday that he would, if elected president, create a system to track foreign visitors the way FedEx tracks packages. The NYT writes: Mr. Christie, who is far back in the pack of candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, said at a campaign event in New Hampshire that he would ask the chief executive of FedEx, Frederick W. Smith, to devise the tracking 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," Mr. Christie told the crowd in Laconia, N.H. "Yet we let people come to this country with visas, and the minute they come in, we lose track of them." He added: "We need to have a system that tracks you from the moment you come in." Adds the submitter: "I'm sure foreign tourist will be amused when getting a bar code sticker slapped on their arm."

27 of 576 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah, nah. by YukariHirai · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm somewhat interested in visiting the US, but this kind of bullshit would absolutely kill any desire to go there.

    1. Re:Yeah, nah. by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm somewhat interested in visiting the US, but this kind of bullshit would absolutely kill any desire to go there.

      It took this? Not our general policy of running around the world tampering with governments, murdering people, and blowing up cities for profit?

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:Yeah, nah. by kyrsjo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Even if we may be skeptical to or disagree with US policy, it doesn't mean that we dislike everyone who lives there or what is there.

    3. Re:Yeah, nah. by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 4, Informative

      I can see it now. Ivy league university hires world class researcher, who has to get tagged with an RFID as if they were cattle to be allowed to work in the US.

      And where specifically did you read that people will be tagged with an RFID? They could simply carry an ID card. A perfectly reasonable requirement. They could check in once in a while. Another perfectly reasonable requirement.

      Many here are making up unreasonable scenarios then arguing how stupid they are.

    4. Re:Yeah, nah. by chipschap · · Score: 4, Informative

      Oh well then, just drop in to your nearest police station or FBI department every morning during your stay to say howdy. Nothing wrong with that.

      The equivalent took place in former communist countries. I remember visiting the DDR (East Germany) and having to turn in my passport every night. Get a little perspective here, please.

  2. Christie is ideal by msobkow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Christie would make the ideal VP for Trump. They're both ignorant bigots.

    --
    I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
    1. Re:Christie is ideal by dinfinity · · Score: 5, Insightful

      At first I thought that Trump was deliberately put into the picture to draw the playing field towards 'the right', i.e. make one guy say the most outlandish stuff so that the previously outlandish things the rest said actually seem reasonable (and conversely, making the actually reasonable stuff sound silly and far away from reality).

      But the completely baffling thing to me is that there are actually droves of people in the US that not only support Trump, but actively defend his words and say asinine shit like: "He's a true American. We need a guy like that for president" and: "The media are making him sound racist". I remember being very surprised that a moron like Bush Jr. could become (and stay!) president, but this is definitely a new low for the US. Trump hasn't been elected yet, but the fact that so many people like him and support him is already deeply, deeply disgraceful.

    2. Re:Christie is ideal by Ambassador+Kosh · · Score: 4, Interesting

      What I would like to see is neither option.

      I want Visas available for all the jobs we need doing. Right now we can't get american's to pick food and until we have robots doing it we need people to do it. We should have a visa just for this purpose and have people get it legally. They should come here legally, work here legally and NOT be exploited by farmers, factories etc.

      On the other end we need to make it vastly simpler to bring in very highly skilled people from other countries. I am not talking about the H1-B crap that is abused and just for getting cheap programmers pretty much. I am talking about people with masters or PhDs from highly respected universities in biotech, nanotech, material science etc. People that we honestly don't have enough of and bringing the best over won't actually have any impact on americans being employed.

      There are some fields where that are only a few thousand qualified people on earth to do certain high tech jobs and we could employ ALL of them with barely a dent in the demand.

      --
      Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD! :)
    3. Re:Christie is ideal by swb · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Trump's immigration "policies" get a lot of support because they basically mirror the same kind of simplistic truth people believe: Illegal immigrants have broken the law and should be deported, walling off the border between the US and Mexico will keep them out, lack of rigorous immigration enforcement enables illegal immigrant criminals to commit crime.

      It seems easy to me to understand why people so easily believe in these ideas, they have a kind of uncomplicated truth to them. If you are not residing or working in the US legally, why shouldn't you be deported? Certainly a large wall on the border would greatly hinder illegal imimgrants from infilitrating the border. We certainly don't want people with violent criminal histories entering the US, bypassing immigration allows these people to enter the US and potentially commit crime and deporting illegal immigrants before they commit crimes seems to have a certain preventative logic to it.

      Of course, none of these "positions" or "ideas" is more than surface deep. The basic logisticts of deporting all illegal immigrants is pretty crazy and lacks a certain humanity in many cases. It's debatable how effective some giant wall would be and who the hell would pay for it?

      None of it seems to address deeper questions of the problems of the current immigration system or why both political parties seem willfully unable to address it, or the value their constituences see in the current system, from cheap, wage-suppressed labor or for political pandering to immigrant groups to expansion of presumably political friendly constituencies.

      And all of them avoid the kind of hard debates on well, who should be allowed to assume residency and work in the US? Is someone going to actually step up to the plate and argue for an open borders policy in an honest an direct manner (it would appear that Trump is the advocate for the opposite policy)? If it's not open borders, then how, exactly will we regulate and enforce an immigration policy in a way that's consistent and achieves desirable goals?

      What's always surprised me is the lack of African American voices in the immigration debate. They have the highest unemployment rates and illegals take the kind of low-skill, entry-level jobs one would assume that would be the easiest for the many African Americans with poor educations to take. This leads to the questions of racial discrimination, although that seems complicated by the idea that Latinos can get these jobs. Then there's arguments about jobs "we won't do" but this begs the quesiton as to why those jobs don't pay more (I guess they don't have to with a supply of illegals) or whether people have some moral right to not work for jobs they don't want, yet be able to demand subsidies for not working.

    4. Re:Christie is ideal by russotto · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You break it - you buy it. And you broke a lot of countries.

      So you want the US to go full imperialist? It's an idea; solve the Mexican illegal immigrant problem by annexing Mexico. Send in a team of special prosecutors (perhaps ex-US Attorneys headed by Christie) to bring the corruption down to New Jersey levels, then admit the Mexican States to the US.

  3. Dumbest thing I've heard today. by 3vi1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    FedEx packages are travelling through a confined system of checkpoints. Unless Christie wants to put checkpoints all around America and have everyone showing their papers to TSA agents on every public highway, it just won't work.

    1. Re:Dumbest thing I've heard today. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      He probably does.

    2. Re:Dumbest thing I've heard today. by U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M · · Score: 4, Funny

      Actually packages can only be at two locations: "your house" and "still in transit".

  4. Re:Unnecessary by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The last thing I want to see is the travesty that is asset forfeiture expanded.

    --
    Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
  5. Wrong people to strip by realxmp · · Score: 5, Informative

    They still would come because they have nothing to lose, most of them have net assets of close to zero. The first generation tends to live hand to mouth. The people who make the money are the American factory owners and farmers who employ them. These are the people you would need to asset strip to stop employment of immigrants but if we think politicians are going to go after these people (their biggest donors) we are naive. Incidentally if the U.S. did manage to deport all 11 million of them it would cause a massive economic implosion due to a drop in demand for basic goods. It would likely also cause a closure of US factories and increase the offshoring of US industry.

    1. Re:Wrong people to strip by Alomex · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The savings in entitlement expenses would more than compensate

      [citation needed]

      In fact I'll save you the trouble, people have studied this and found the exact opposite. Illegal immigrants can access few entitlements yet pay many taxes, so they are usually net contributors.

      That is, if you care about the facts.

    2. Re:Wrong people to strip by TedHornsby · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I work in the construction industry, an industry especially notorious for the employment of illegal immigrants, so I have some personal experience in regards to illegal immigration. First of all, this picture Donald Trump has been painting of violent criminals and Mexican citizens coming here in droves to live off government welfare programs is just not true. These are blue-collar, hard-working, decent people who have come here to escape ruthless violence (fueled by American demand for illegal drugs) and extensive poverty. They have become the foundation that several sectors of the US economy are built on. What people like Donald Trump and his ilk need to realize is that the violent criminals, for the most part, have no real inclination to pack up and move themselves across the Rio Grande. It's much easier for these drug gangs to operate on their side of the border, where widespread corruption has enabled them to operate with near impunity, than it is for them to "invade" America, where they have to deal with state, local, and federal law enforcement agencies that are more motivated by arrest and seizure statistics than a personal bribe. Speaking from my own experiences, the career criminals that do come across the border end up being arrested over here, which results in their deportation back across the border. 99% of Mexicans here illegally are ordinary people simply trying to support themselves and their families. As things are now, these people live in constant fear that any encounter or interaction with police or government officials will end up with them sitting in a holding cell, awaiting deportation, while their wife and children remain in America. These families are torn apart, with wives and mothers suddenly finding themselves with 3 children to support and no source of income. One woman I know of has resorted to collecting scrap metal to support a 5 year-old son and infant daughter. The sight of a 5 year-old kid helping his mother load an old water heater into a truck so that they might be able to keep a roof over their heads is something that those arguing for tougher immigration enforcement never have, and probably never will, experience. The truth of the matter is that those working here illegally are not much different from the people who comprise our own working-class. In fact, Mexican workers that are paid "under-the-table" (as in they don't have anything taxes taken out of their paycheck) are relatively rare. Meaning they financially contribute to a system under which they are considered as faceless statistics and under which they have no voice. This has gotten long enough, so I'll stop here. Just remember, that just because someone is labeled "illegal" does not make them a criminal. P.S.: Before somebody decides to get pedantic with that last statement, I am aware that being here illegally means they are in violation of the law, and technically a criminal. What I was trying to illustrate was the absurdity that people are criminalized for simply providing for themselves and their loved ones.

  6. Silly season is in full swing by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Each year since the late 90's the Republicans have become more and more batshit insane. It's become like a contest now.

    And there are a lot of us out there who would vote Republican again if only they would lose that crazy shit, and get back to real conservative principles, like watch the money, but pay the bills, and to let people alone.

    What is amazing though is that some of their base will go along with this, even though Christie's Star of David patch idea smacks a little of a mark of the beast as well. The amazing thing is that a mainstream candidate like Christie would not think twice about proposing this really bad idea with really bad precedents.

    --
    The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
  7. Classic slippery slope by kheldan · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Let's say for arguments sake that people actually thought this was a good idea; how long would it be before someone came up with some half-assed justification to treat everyone, citizen and visitor alike, this way?

    Also, what ever happened to:

    Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
    With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
    Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
    A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
    Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
    Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
    Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
    The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
    "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
    With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
    I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

    An idea like Mr. Christies' flies in the face of one of the things this country was supposed to be about in the first place. I know damned well that the United States I grew up believing in never really existed, but damnit, why can't we make it that? I want the Founding Fathers of this country to turn out to be right, not George Orwell!

    Finally, what kind of an asshole do you have to be to come up with an idea like this? Fuck that, and fuck Christie sideways with a rusty chainsaw for even suggesting something like this.

    --
    Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
  8. But it wouldn't work anyway. by khasim · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But it wouldn't work anyway.

    I don't think he even understands FedEx. FedEx cannot tell you where a package is RIGHT NOW. They can only tell you where it was LAST SCANNED.

    The reason this works well for packages is that packages don't move themselves. And even then it has failures. This will completely fail because HUMANS can wander around on their own.

    Sounds more like Christie wants to associate his campaign with something that people have a mostly positive opinion of. But I'm pretty sure that FedEx will not want to be associated with a losing candidate OR the concept of tagging and tracking undesirable races/nationalities (shades of Nazi German there).

  9. Re:The above is informative ? by Calydor · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think people are more upset at the perceived risk of getting a barcode tattoo reminiscent of what they used in concentration camps (yeah, I Godwin'ed the thread), or maybe getting pulled over and shot by a cop for having a broken tail light.

    Such things really does count against visiting the US compared to taking a week on a beach somewhere else.

    --
    -=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
  10. Re:America has been put in a bad position. by polymath69 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    According to the article, 40% of illegals are visa overstayers. This breaks the syllogism you attempted to imply all asunder.

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    --
    I don't want to rule the world... I just want to be in charge of mayonnaise.
  11. Re:The above is informative ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What's your definition of "peace"? There are always multiple wars going on in numerous places in the world, constantly. Many of these are being interfered with, instigated, or supported by the US and its allies. It's profitable to sell weapons to both sides, to keep the wars going. The only more profitable situation is when you get your puppet installed as leader, then you can just pilfer the public assets wholesale.

    Just because it's peaceful in your little gated neighbourhood, doesn't mean the rest of the world is a-ok.

  12. Re:SJWs by Ambassador+Kosh · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Racism DID NOT end in Germany. They just stopped talking about it publicaly. Sure the law says that a business can't discriminate based on your race but they actually do. One of the students in my class went back home to India after being accepted in a masters program here in Germany since he found several landlords that told him they did not rent to people from India.

    Europe is too much of a monoculture to see much outward racism but it still exists and it is pretty vile since it is not talked about. Laws against racism seem to be almost never actually enforced at least in Germany. It was just recently a German professor told an Indian male student that she did not accept male students from India because of their rape culture and her university DEFENDED her. She is facing no sanctions of any kind and other professors in Germany have stood up and said they do the same thing. That is truly evil.

    The USA is having a hard time trying to deal with racism but it actually trying to deal with it and the road is going to be bumpy and violent but I think it will work out in the end and meanwhile Europe will just quietly keep it and hide it.

    --
    Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD! :)
  13. This is Stupid by whistlingtony · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here are the top ten leading causes of death in the USA.

    1. Heart disease
    2. Cancer (malignant neoplasms)
    3. Chronic lower respiratory disease
    4. Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases)
    5. Accidents (unintentional injuries)
    6. Alzheimer's disease
    7. Diabetes (diabetes mellitus)
    8. Influenza and pneumonia
    9. Kidney disease (nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis)
    10. Suicide (intentional self-harm).

    I looked. Homicide is 15th. Death By Terrorism isn't on this list. Overdose from drugs bought from drug dealing immigrants isn't either. Just once I wish we'd wage a war on Cancer or Drunk Driving, ya know?

    Also, because it has to be said.... Maybe we can put their tracking bar code on some kind of armband? This shit is !@#$ing stupid and dangerously close to Nazi levels of moron. We have a serious politician blaming the Jews Immigrants and willing to label them. Oh. Come. On!

    The Republican party invited in the stupid and completely has lost it's !@#$ing mind.

  14. A system to track everything by ememisya · · Score: 4, Funny

    We need to have a system that tracks you from the moment you come in.

    Yea if only we had such a device just about everybody carried around in their pockets with a GPS, camera, microphone, gyroscope, radio etc. Now it would be ideal if only there were handful of giant service providers, so we could work with them to get it done. Naah, who am I kidding? This is America, we have rights, you could never get something like that done.

  15. Re:The above is informative ? by reboot246 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you subtract the number of wars in which Muslims are involved, the world is nearly totally peaceful. Mod me down if you wish, but look and read and learn first. An easier way would be to name the wars NOT involving Muslims.

    There can be no peace with a religion that insists on converting you or killing you.