Why Trump’s ‘gold card’ visa is actually a $5mn green card

medium118594790US President Donald Trump unveiled the first 'gold card', a residency permit sold for $5 million each, aboard Air Force One on Thursday (April 3).Holding a personalized prototype that bore his face, signature and an inscription "The Trump Card", the Republican president told reporters that the special visa would probably be available "in less than two weeks"."I'm the first buyer," he said. “For $5 million this could be yours... Pretty exciting, right?” he added with a grin when he popped across to the back of his presidential plane as he flew to Florida to play golf after announcing global trade tariffs earlier.It was not clear if Trump was just pulling off a caper or was serious about the design and the two-week deadline, considering the programme has to be approved by the US Congress, but stranger things have happened in the Trump White House.Trump had made an announcement about the the 'gold card' visa programme about a month ago – on February 25. He said the visa would be available to people willing to pay $5mn (about ₹44 crore) — nearly five times what a US investment visa now costs.“It’s going to give you green card privileges plus it’s going to be a route to (American) citizenship,” he said.Trump's claimsAbout 12 countries in the world offer citizenship in exchange for investment — such as Malta, Egypt and Cambodia. But that would be a ‘golden passport’, which grants full citizenship rights. The minimum investment can start around $100,000 but go up to millions, like for the now-suspended programme in Cyprus.Trump’s gold card programme, meanwhile, is a residency-by-investment plan. A golden visa. The purpose, he said, was more revenue. The MAGA supremo has thrown out fantastic numbers about the demand for the card and the revenue that will accrue to the US, saying, “If we sell a million, that’s $5 trillion dollars.” He then ramped up the fantasy, saying, “If we can find 10 million people willing to pay $5 million each,” the US could make $50 trillion — enough, he claimed, to “pay off the entire US national debt”.“They’ll be wealthy and they’ll be successful, and they’ll be spending a lot of money and paying a lot of taxes and employing a lot of people, and we think it’s going to be extremely successful,” he said when he first announced the proposed gold card from the Oval Office last month. He also suggested US firms could use the programme to retain elite foreign graduates.Asked if that included Russian oligarchs, he said that was possible. “I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people… I think they could afford $5mn.” Another use of the gold card that he mentioned could be by companies willing to pay to “get people in” — by footing the investment visa bill for top college graduates.Smaller countries like Vanuatu or Dominica gain a large share of their revenue from such programmes. But “[citizenship and residency by investment programmes] are also attractive to criminals and corrupt officials seeking to evade justice and launder the proceeds of crime reaching into the billions of dollars”, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) had flagged in a 2023 report. medium118594887What will the gold card replace?It will replace the EB-5 visa programme, an investor visa programme that allows foreign nationals to invest between $800,000 and $1.05mn in the US economy for conditional immigrant visas, putting them on a path to permanent residency (a green card). An investment under the plan would have to be in a new business that would create at least 10 full-time jobs for American workers. Or it could go into a government-approved entity (called a regional centre) that acts as a link between EB-5 investors and job-creating projects.But the money has to go into the economy as capital investment — it is not a direct payment to the government. Also, there is a ceiling on how many applicants from a country can receive the visas annually — 7%, or about 700 EB-5 visas in a year. (But unused visas can be reallocated to applicants from oversubscribed countries with high demand, like China and India, which face wait times going up to six years.)For the gold card visa, Trump has not officially specified any ceiling, only saying, “We will be able to sell, maybe, a million of these cards. Maybe more than that”, and then raising that possible figure to “10 million”.The EB-5 programme has been controversial within the US and has faced opposition from some Democrats in the past on the grounds that the country should not be “selling” visas. But strident support for the programme comes from the American real estate sector, for which it has been an important source of funding since the 2010s. (Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is said to have benefited from the investment-for-visa plan as well.)But, now, the Trump administration’s feelings about the programme have changed. His commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, standing behind Trump during the address last month, said the “ridiculous” EB-5 programme was “full of nonsense, make-believe and fraud. And it was a way to get a green card that was low-priced”.The EB-5 programme attracts less than 10,000 investors annually, but Lutnick said in an interview on Fox Business that 1,000 gold cards had been sold in a single day, generating $5 billion, even before the card was ready. medium118594900Is it actually feasible?The Washington Post cited immigration experts to make the point that the Trump administration might not be able to do this without the US Congress. Because while the Trump administration believes that it can make the changes because it is “not doing citizenship”, experts said the EB-5 programme itself is “statutorily constrained”.The EB-5 visa was introduced in 1990 to “stimulate the US economy through job creation and capital investment by foreign investors”. Since then, it has been reauthorised over and over — and the latest reauthorisation runs till 2027.Ad while some of Trump’s MAGA supporters have bought into the idea of raking in billions and trillions, more nativist supporters have questioned if it is wise to sell US residency leading to citizenship. Late night comics have made withering jokes about it, including this from Desi Lydic on the Daily Show: “It beats the old way of becoming a citizen...marry Donald Trump.”Meanwhile, from Jimmy Kimmel: “What a good idea. I’ve always said our immigration system should run more like the customer rewards programme at a casino in Atlantic City... this is basically what he does at Mara-Lago. He’s selling memberships to a country club, but this club is actually our country.”