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Sunday, March 16, 2025

Trump says he will offer ‘gold cards’ for $5 million path to citizenship

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18 days ago
20250226
President Donald Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House, Thursday, Jan. 30, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

President Donald Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House, Thursday, Jan. 30, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump said Tues­day that he plans to of­fer a “gold card” visa with a path to cit­i­zen­ship for $5 mil­lion, re­plac­ing a 35-year-old visa for in­vestors.

“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,” Trump said in the Oval Of­fice.

Com­merce Sec­re­tary Howard Lut­nick said the “Trump Gold Card” would re­place EB-5 visas in two weeks. EB-5s were cre­at­ed by Con­gress in 1990 to gen­er­ate for­eign in­vest­ment and are avail­able to peo­ple who spend about $1 mil­lion on a com­pa­ny that em­ploys at least 10 peo­ple.

Lut­nick said the gold card — ac­tu­al­ly a green card, or per­ma­nent le­gal res­i­den­cy — would raise the price of ad­mis­sion for in­vestors and do away with fraud and “non­sense” that he said char­ac­ter­ize the EB-5 pro­gram. Like oth­er green cards, it would in­clude a path to cit­i­zen­ship.

About 8,000 peo­ple ob­tained in­vestor visas in the 12-month pe­ri­od end­ing Sept. 30, 2022, ac­cord­ing to the Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty De­part­ment’s most re­cent Year­book of Im­mi­gra­tion Sta­tis­tics. The Con­gres­sion­al Re­search Ser­vice re­port­ed in 2021 that EB-5 visas pose risks of fraud, in­clud­ing ver­i­fi­ca­tion that funds were ob­tained legal­ly.

In­vestors’ visas are com­mon around the world. Hen­ley & Part­ners, an ad­vi­so­ry firm, says more than 100 coun­tries around the world of­fer “gold­en visas” to wealthy in­di­vid­u­als, in­clud­ing the Unit­ed States, Unit­ed King­dom, Spain, Greece, Mal­ta, Aus­tralia, Cana­da and Italy.

Trump made no men­tion of the re­quire­ments for job cre­ation. And, while the num­ber of EB-5 visas is capped, Trump mused that the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment could sell 10 mil­lion “gold cards” to re­duce the deficit. He said it “could be great, maybe it will be fan­tas­tic.”

“It’s some­what like a green card, but at a high­er lev­el of so­phis­ti­ca­tion, it’s a road to cit­i­zen­ship for peo­ple, and es­sen­tial­ly peo­ple of wealth or peo­ple of great tal­ent, where peo­ple of wealth pay for those peo­ple of tal­ent to get in, mean­ing com­pa­nies will pay for peo­ple to get in and to have long, long term sta­tus in the coun­try,” he said.

Con­gress de­ter­mines qual­i­fi­ca­tions for cit­i­zen­ship, but Trump said “gold cards” would not re­quire con­gres­sion­al ap­proval.

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