PrintIvana Trump: We need immigrants to clean for us
Donald Trump's ex-wife Ivana told the New York Post in an interview that all Americans should support the candidate's immigration policies because, after all, without immigrants, who would do the cleaning for us?
“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,” she added.
The Republican presidential front-runner's first wife insisted she has “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 gives birth in American hospital, which is for free. The child becomes American automatically,” she said. “She brings the whole family, she doesn’t pay the taxes, she doesn’t have a job, she gets housing, she gets the food stamps. Who’s paying? You and me.”
Donald Trump has promised throughout his presidential campaign to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border and make Mexico pay for it.
I think she was trying to be helpful to her ex, but instead, she uttered what has to be the most offensive, stereotypical, demeaning, completely clueless statement of the entire campaign. Of course, most legal immigrants do not end up as domestic servants. And out of the 700,000 illegals who enter the country every year, how many are pregnant women looking to have "anchor babies"?
The Trump campaign claims that the number is 400,000. But a Pew survey showed that fewer than 300,000 children were born in the U.S. to illegal parents.
What's more, almost all anchor baby parents are subject to deportation if they're caught.
For illegal immigrant parents, being the parent of a U.S. citizen child almost never forms the core of a successful defense in an immigration court. In short, if the undocumented parent of a U.S.-born child is caught in the United States, he or she legally faces the very same risk of deportation as any other immigrant.
In Ivana's defense, I'm sure this is a typical attitude among the super-rich – the perspective of an anteater eyeing an anthill. But the end result of Ivana Trump's insensitive and ignorant observations will put a further drag on Donald Trump's effort to attract a sizable segment of the Hispanic vote and the votes of those independents who are appalled at Ivan's attitude toward legal immigrants.
