Given the generally dismal state of leadership contests in this country, it’s no wonder that I’ve been secretly coveting America’s hunt for a Republican presidential candidate. On the surface, it should be so much worse than anything we’ve had to endure – they have an entire army of candidates and their contest is approximately 1,000 years long – and yet it’s been teaching us all so much. Barely a day goes by without one hugely significant problem or another being solved forever by the Republicans. This week: immigration.

It’s refreshing to see America tackle immigration with such relish. While everyone in the EU is preoccupied with pinging the blame around so that none of the blood ends up on anybody’s hands, the Republican candidates are heroically throwing up solution after solution.

This is all thanks to Donald Trump, obviously. Ever since the cloud-headed blowhard suggested the immediate ejection of 11 million people from within America’s borders as a means to stem immigration, his rivals have all been busting a gut to think of something equally spectacular. One of them, Scott Walker, wants to build a wall along the Canadian border; partly to stop terrorists from entering from the north, but mainly because his one goal in life is to brick up Niagara Falls in order to retrieve a Game Boy Advance that he accidentally dropped off Terrapin Point in 2003. It’s noble of him, but not exactly something that an island nation such as ours can implement.

However, there are so many candidates vying for office that the infinite monkey/typewriter principle has kicked in, and New Jersey governor Chris Christie has struck gold. His plan to track immigrants like FedEx parcels is the kind of magical, once-in-a-lifetime diamond bullet of an idea that makes everyone kick themselves for not having thought of it earlier. He wants to round up the immigrants, inject them with microchips so that the government can see exactly where they are at any given moment in time – or better yet, tattoo barcodes across their foreheads – and then hunt them down the moment their visa expires.

Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker. Photograph: Charlie Neibergall/AP

Oh sure, it might sound like the sort of desperately inhumane plan that’s cooked up as part of a harebrained 3am bid to steal the wingnut vote away from Trump, but that’s the beauty of it. You need to treat immigrants as unwanted commodities, you see, because if you even for a second regarded them as actual human beings, the unstoppable sadness of the situation would crush you and crush you and keep crushing your heart deep inside your chest until nothing was left and you spent the rest of your days weeping uselessly into your floppy fists at the sheer unconquerable cruelty of it all.

So, thank you, Chris Christie. You’re on the right track. Boris Johnson, let’s not forget, has been co-opting the power of the private sector to deal with complicated social issues in London for years, using corporate money to answer questions as diverse as “How can I fund this cable car that will shuttle zero people between two places they don’t want to go?” and “What’s the biggest and ugliest almost-sculpture I can vomit up next to the Olympic stadium?”.

That said, I do have one slight issue with Chris Christie’s plan, and that’s the use of FedEx. If Christie is serious about using FedEx technology to track immigrants – and he is, because he keeps namechecking the company over and over again like a reality show star writing promotional tweets for moisturiser – then clearly some kinks have to be ironed out. For example, if my experiences with FedEx are anything to go by, the future for the world’s immigrants will mainly involve them being kept at a regional depot in Basingstoke for three weeks before turning up at my house unannounced one evening while I’m eating my tea.

But that doesn’t matter, because it’s the seed of the idea that’s important: private money to solve public problems. Maybe instead of FedEx, we could have all immigrants legally declared as Uber vehicles, and they’d be forced to spend their lives giving piggybacks to cheapskates until their backs gave out and they had to return to their county of origin.

Or perhaps we could go for the budget option. Let’s convince Domino’s to adapt their Pizza Tracker app so that immigrants could see how they’re doing here. First, it would read: “People hate you because you’re unemployed.” Then: “People hate you for taking their jobs.” Then: “The Daily Mail hates you for buying a flatscreen TV, even though it’s impossible to buy any other sort of TV these days.” “An internet commenter just referred to you as ‘it’.” That sort of thing. It wouldn’t necessarily get rid of them, but at least they’d be kept abreast of the prevailing public mood.

Best of all, we could get Amazon drones to track the immigrants. Whenever a visa expires, a drone could hurtle out of the sky and knock the immigrant into one of Google’s driverless cars, which would then drive them to the airport while streaming a Spotify playlist made up of songs that contain the phrase “go home” in their titles. This, really, would be the ideal situation. We’d barely even have to look at the immigrants, let alone think about their lives or how monstrously we were treating them. Chris Christie, you’re a trailblazer.