If Jon Stewart were running "The Daily Show," Chris Christie might not have had it easy -- but it would've been nothing like what happened on Wednesday night.
As an immigrant, Trevor Noah wanted to know what the hell the New Jersey Governor was thinking when he proposed in August that tracking people like Fed-Ex packages was a solution for immigration reform."I felt like you were talking to me personally," Noah said as a South African immigrant who came to the United States after years as a successful comedian and actor. Presumably Christie would have Noah stamped with a "barcode of love" as well. "I was thinking of getting it here," Noah said standing up and pointing to his lower back. "Like a tramp stamp."
"No, no, no," Christie tried to breakdown Noah's schtick. "Hold up both your hands. You got ten stamps already." Christie continued that he thinks those who enter the country could be fingerprinted and that would be the unique tracker for everything the person did in the United States.
Noah then asked what Christie meant by everything -- are we talking about airport security or rental cars? "You have a database," Christie said. "And if it says you’ve overstayed, we tap you on the shoulder and say, 'Thanks for coming.'"
The cost of building and maintaining the biometric system Christie proposes could run up as much as $7 billion price-tag just to overhaul it in the airports, Noah pointed out, but Christie insisted it was a small price to pay. "It's a lot cheaper than building a 2,000 mile wall across the southern border," he responded, taking a veiled shot at Donald Trump's immigration plan.
It's unclear if this was Chris Christie's Hail Mary pass trying to up his sagging poll numbers coming out of the GOP debate last month. If it was, it wasn't a great one. The one thing it did was force him to speak face to face with an immigrant who could talk about how the issue matters in personal terms.
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