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President Donald Trump announced a new path to U.S. citizenship: a pricey gold card.
The U.S. is going to “sell” gold cards for $5 million, Trump announced in the Oval Office Tuesday.
“We’re going to be putting a price on that card of about $5 million and that’s going to give you [permanent resident] Green Card privileges, plus it’s going to be a route to citizenship,” the president said. He branded it as “somewhat like a Green Card but at a higher level of sophistication.”
“Wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card,” he continued. “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 and never been done before.”
Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick clarified the Trump administration plans to terminate a somewhat similar EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program and “replace it with the Trump gold card.”
The EB-5 program allows investors to apply for permanent residence in the U.S. if they “make the necessary investment in a commercial enterprise in the United States” and plan to create or preserve 10 permanent full-time jobs.
Lutnick said the EB-5 program was “full of nonsense, make-believe and fraud” claiming it was poorly managed.
“It was a way to get a green card that was low priced, Lutnick said.
Once vetted, gold card holders “can invest in America and we can use that money to reduce our deficit,” he added.
While the gold card visas are a slight shift from the EB-5 program, they are not an unprecedented idea. Other countries such as the United Kingdom, Spain, Greece, Malta, Australia, Canada and Italy have had similar programs.
The president predicted that the gold card will bring in “very high level people” who create jobs. With these cards, “you’re getting big taxpayers, big job producers, and we’ll be able to sell maybe a million of these cards, maybe more than that,” Trump said.
When asked if there would be restrictions on people from certain countries such as Iran or China the president said they likely would not restrict countries but would evaluate individual people.
Trump was then asked if Russian oligarchs could qualify to which he responded, “Possibly. I know some Russian oligarchs who are very nice people.”
The Kushner family was sharply criticized eight years ago after the sister of Jared Kushner, then senior White House adviser to his father-in-laws Donald Trump, traveled to Beijing to tempt wealthy Chinese with an EB-5 Green Card with an investment in one of the Kushner family’s real estate projects — an offer that a former White House ethics lawyer under George. W. Bush called “corruption, pure and simple.”
The new citizenship pathway comes as the Trump administration cracks down on immigration into the U.S. The president even issued an executive order to end birthright citizenship. An appeals court last week rejected the Trump administration’s request to pause a lower court judge’s order halting the president’s executive order.
