One of Donald Trump’s top immigration official has offered a revised version of the famous Statue of Liberty inscription which welcomes the world’s poor to justify a new tightening of the rules.

Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, was asked whether the words of Emma Lazarus's The New Colossus poem found at the statute’s base still hold true today.

The poem’s final lines read: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Mr Cuccinelli said the words “certainly are” still part of the American ethos when challenged in an NPR interview but then went on to give a revised version of them.

"Give me your tired and your poor - who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge,” he said.