Christie Would Deliver Us Overnight to Lunacy
In an interview on "Fox News Sunday," moderator Chris Wallace also asked Christie how he was going to track immigrants given that "they don't have a number, you know, a label on their wrist."
"We can do it," Christie responded. "And we should bring in the folks from FedEx to use the technology to be able to do it. There's nothing wrong with that."
Are you serious? Everything is wrong with that. In fact, it didn't take long for some of my Jewish friends to point out that there's actually been a low-tech version of this sort of thing before. Besides, do we really need GPS for immigrants? How hard could it be to find your gardener, housekeeper, nanny?
During the interview, Christie acknowledged that people are not packages.
"My point was, this is once again a situation where the private sector laps us in the government with the use of technology," he said.
And this is the biggest mistake of all, Mr. Wizard. Treating technology as our savior only perpetrates the narrative that, with a white board and some dry erasers, a roomful of smart people could discern what's broken with our immigration system and come up with a way to fix it.
That's not so. This is not an engineering problem; this is a political problem. And until our elected leaders quit playing games, stop demagoguing immigrants, ditch simplistic solutions, stop dealing with immigration as a cultural phenomenon when it is an economic one, level with constituents, and help Americans kick our addiction to immigrant labor, we can implant bar codes in millions of illegal immigrants and nothing will change.
That is, other than our national character and who we are as Americans. That will be mangled beyond recognition.
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Ruben Navarrette's email address is ruben@rubennavarrette.com.
Copyright 2015 Washington Post Writers Group
