Donald Trump's ex-wife says she does not want ’19-year-old pregnant Mexican women’ coming to the US

In an interview, Donald Trump’s former wife said the US 'needed' immigrants as 'otherwise nobody would do the vacuuming'

Ivana Trump says Donald Trump gave her a 'chance' when she was 'poor' (Rex Features)

Donald Trump’s former wife has spoken in favour of the real estate mogul’s immigration policies, railing against pregnant Mexican teenagers coming to the US but also saying some migrants are necesary to do the jobs that Americans "do not want".

In an interview at her Manhattan home with the New York Post, Ivana Trump said: “As long as you come here legally and get a proper job . . . we need immigrants. Who’s going to vacuum our living rooms and clean up after us? Americans don’t like to do that.”

Ms Trump, who came to Canada from Czechoslovakia in the 1970s, then married Mr Trump and moved to the US, said he gave her a "chance” when she was “poor”. She was appointed head of interior design at the Grand Hyatt Hotel when she was seven months pregnant.

Yet when she was questioned about her ex-husband’s pledge to ban Mexicans from the country and build a high wall along the border, she was not so sympathetic to young, pregnant women.

“I have nothing against Mexicans, but if they [come] here — like this 19-year-old, she’s pregnant, she crossed over a wall that’s this high,” she said, reportedly lowering her hand to four inches above the ground. ”She gives the birth in American hospital, which is for free. The child becomes American automatically. She brings the whole family, she doesn’t pay the taxes, she doesn’t have a job, she gets the housing, she gets the food stamps. Who’s paying? You and me.”

Ms Trump, who is the mother of three of Mr Trump’s children, said she advises him before and after his speeches, telling him to “be more calm”. She also claimed to have coined his motto of: “You think it, I say it."

His ex-wife, who ended the marriage when she found out he had cheated on her with former beauty queen Marla Maples, said Mr Trump was not a feminist, but added he “loved women”.

She also backtracked on her accusation that he had raped her, which she alleged in her 1993 book “Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J Trump”.

She said in a statement after the book was published: “As a woman, I felt violated, as the love and tenderness, which he normally exhibited toward me, was absent. I referred to this as a ‘rape’, but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”

She told the New York Post: “It was all the lawyers. The negotiations and stuff like that. I was never abused.”