EDITORIAL: Off the wall ideas on immigration

What hath Donald Trump’s tough stance on immigration wrought?

In the last few days, it seems it has prompted at least two low-polling, Republican presidential candidates, Gov. Chris Christie and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, to try to out-Trump Trump when it comes to immigration policy.

While campaigning in New Hampshire Saturday, Christie said he would like to track visa-holding immigrants the way Amazon.com tracks packages. Walker, on “Meet the Press” Sunday, said America should consider building a wall between the U.S. and Canada.

Both ideas smack of desperate attempts to steal some thunder from the Trump campaign in the hopes that it will generate some electricity for their own faltering campaigns. In the latest Monmouth University poll, released Monday, Christie weighed in at less than 1 percent. Walker was at 7 percent.

Christie has done a complete flip-flop on immigration over the last couple of years. When running for re-election, he campaigned by reaching out to minorities and claiming he was in favor of the federal government providing a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. He even signed a bill in 2013 that would allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition at all public colleges and universities in New Jersey.

Those days are gone. He said in May that he does not support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. But he doubled down this past weekend, saying that if he were elected president he would combat illegal immigration by creating a system to track foreign visitors the way FedEx tracks packages.

“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,” Christie told an audience 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. ...We need to have a system that tracks you from the moment you come in. However long your visa is, then we go get you. We tap you on the shoulder and say, ‘Excuse me. Thanks for coming. Time to go.’ ”

Christie did not say specifically how he envisioned the system tracking people the same way packages are tracked by FedEx, which scans a bar code on the package at each step of its delivery. Nevertheless, hasn’t recent history taught us how badly this sort of thing can go? From interning Japanese-Americans here to identifying certain groups, including Jews and Gypsies, who had to have their identification papers on them at all times in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, we have witnessed horrible acts in the name of security.

Attempting to steal headlines from Trump is no way to run a serious campaign. Trump has commanded a great deal of attention — and support — for his hardline position on immigration. But candidates should not go off the rails with nonsensical ideas to help steal the spotlight.