Politics & Government

Gingrich: Package Tracking Could Be Used to Locate Illegal Immigrants

The former House speaker was rallying support at Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, Illinois, on Wednesday.

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich rallied support from a crowd of about a hundred at Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, IL, Wednesday afternoon, following losses in the Alabama and Mississippi primaries on Tuesday.

Gingrich told the crowd FedEx and UPS track 24 million packages a day, with no additional cost to customers.

“Now over here you have the federal government, the world that doesn’t work,” Gingrich said. “And the federal government today cannot find 11 million illegal immigrants even if they’re sitting still.

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“So one of my suggestions was, what if we were to mail a package to every person who’s here illegally, and then when it got delivered we would pull them up and we would know exactly where it was because it would be in UPS and FedEx.”

Earlier:

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Gingrich said that, on one level, he was just making a point.

“But let me make the point in a very real way as it affects the federal government,” Gingrich said.

He said by modernizing the anti-fraud systems for Medicaid and Medicare in a similar way to American Express credit cards, the federal government would save billions of dollars.

“The current estimate for the amount we would save if you had a modern anti-fraud system in Medicaid and Medicare is between $16 and $110 billion dollars,” Gingrich said. “In a 10-year period that would be $600 billion to a trillion dollars in savings.”

He went on to explain how modernizing government applies to Springfield as well.

"...how do you modernize the government of the state of Illinois so that it’s not the most expensive pension system in the country, and it’s not killing jobs in Illinois?" Gingrich said. "This problem is true across all of our systems; it’s not just Washington. We really have to have a dramatic modernization of what we’re doing if we’re going to compete in the world."

At the rally, there appeared to be as many media professionals as supporters, with around two hundred in attendance.

Though the southern states were tough losses for his campaign, in his speech Tuesday night, Gingrich reiterated that he would campaign for delegates all the way to the Republican national convention in August.

A memo from the Gingrich campaign claimed he still had a path to the nomination, but many analysts say that is unlikely, the New York Times reported.

Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum’s supporters are calling for Republicans to unite behind him in order to square off against former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, Bloomberg reported.

Gingrich was neck-and-neck with Romney in Alabama and Mississippi. In Alabama both candidates had 29 percent of the vote, behind Santorum with 35 percent. In Mississippi they tied at 31 percent behind Santorum’s 33 percent.

Still, Gingrich trails Romney and Santorum in delegates. Romney has 419, Santorum has 184 and Gingrich has 136. A total of 1,144 delegates are needed to secure the nomination.


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