Daniel Weintraub of the Sacramento Bee has expressed the opinion that the most interesting part of the Governor’s private recordings is his “earthy, blunt assessment of the immigration issue”. This discussion, he thought, was “rare glimpse at a politician working through a tough issue, one on which he is conflicted, and seeing how his mind works” and, Weintraud says, “it wasn’t very pretty”. The Governor was speaking to his speechwriter Gary Delsohn at the time and said that the the 1986 amnesty had: “fucked the American people” because it legalized millions of immigrants while promising better enforcement of the border and employer sanctions, which never materialized”.

Governor Schwarzenegger compared the situation of illegal immigrants to “squatters” in Zimbabwe. “They come and land, you can’t then get rid of them”, he says. He then rather harshly compared them to house guests that come for a visit but don’t work and don’t leave, and he marveled at the “Plasa de Mexico” shopping mall that has been built in Linwood. “I was down there” he said, “Everyone only spoke Spanish, every shop was in Spanish, every sign was in Spanish. They create a Mexico within California”.

Schwarzenegger also said that it makes no sense to try to round up 12 million illegal immigrants or to split up extended families, and said he didn’t think the border fence would work because people could tunnel under it but he didn’t like it anyway because it reminds him of the Berlin Wall. “I come from a country where we had walls around castles, we had walls around houses, and we had walls around– we had the Berlin Wall- we had walls everywhere. But we always looked at the wall as kind of like the outside of the wall is the enemy. Are we looking at Mexico as the enemy? No, it’s not. These are our trading partners.”

The Sacramento Bee has publish transcripts of the Governor’s wide ranging opinions in these recording at this link.

“The number of Los Angeles County jail inmates identified as suspected illegal immigrants nearly doubled in the past year, according to a report in today’s Los Angeles Times. The sharp increase in potential deportees- from 3,050 in 2005 to 5,829 last year, is believed to be the result of more screening, rather than an increase in the number of illegal immigrants in the jails. “The benefit is these people who are committing crimes aren’t being released onto our streets to commit more crimes. They are being removed from the United States,” said Jim Hayes, director of the Los Angeles field office for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.