A few candidates, still finding themselves eating The Donald's dust, have apparently decided to outdo His Royal Hair-ness by flinging some outrageous plans of their own out there to see how they fly. Their ideas are, to put it mildly, interesting.
Speaking at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire on Saturday:
"So here's what I'm gonna do if I'm president. I'm gonna ask 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...Cause guess what? Of the eleven million people who are here illegally, 40 percent of them didn't come in over the southern border. 40 percent of them came in legally with a visa, and overstayed their visa. We need to have a system that tracks you from the moment you come in...And when your time is up...then we go get you--tap you on the shoulder and say excuse me, thanks for coming, time to go."
what eye thynk: How does he envision this working exactly? Will visitors to the U.S. get stamped with a bar code that will somehow be magically read by every building they enter? Or maybe he sees an implanted microchip ID--similar to those pet owners use to help find their lost pets--that will cause a traffic map to light up showing the implantee's location as he moves around the U.S.?When asked about his idea for immigrants and FedEx on "Fox News Sunday," Mr. Christie said he didn't intend to say he'd treat people like packages, but "the entire conversation about 'anchor babies' is a distraction that makes us sound like we're anti-immigrant, and we're not."
Skipping over his claim that Republicans are not anti-immigrant; did he think his plan to have FedEx track U.S. visitors would somehow be seen as a legitimate (and therefore not distracting) subject for discussion?
Scott Walker:
Earlier to day, Mr. Walker appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press," and talked about a New Hampshire town hall meeting of his own where, he said, the idea of a wall along the U.S.-Canada border was brought up.
"Some people have asked us about that in New Hampshire. They raised some very legitimate concerns, including some law enforcement folks that brought that up to me at one of our town hall meetings about a week and a half ago. So that is a legitimate issue for us to look at."
Personally, I think it's a miracle Canada hasn't put up a wall of their own just to keep Ted Cruz from coming back.
Seriously, by trying to keep dying campaigns afloat, people like Chris Christie and Scott Walker are overlooking the real point of the primary season--to find a candidate who can hopefully win the general election.
Stupid ideas like time-stamping legal visitors' foreheads or building a wall along an ally's border may get them a few minutes' attention; but when the general election gets here, all these off-the-wall anti-immigrant ideas are going to come back to bite the eventual candidate in the butt. Which is an outcome I can get behind. (See what I did there?)
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