Donald Trump has announced a green card equivalent; a “gold card” that would offer rich foreigners the opportunity to fork over $5 million to have unlimited access to the United States of America.
What?
Trump’s proposed offer is called the “gold card.” It offers people outside of The United States the opportunity to pay their hard earned money to earn U.S citizenship.
This program would also replace the EB-5 Investor program, which gives large foreign investors a visa. The investments must go towards projects that benefit areas with high unemployment rates and be in between $800,000 and $1.05 million.
Why?
Instead, the gold card would offer the same benefit for a flat $5 million, targeting just generally wealthy people, not investors. The reason for this is that Donald Trump believes these people, most likely entrepreneurs, will create job opportunities and overall growth to America.
The benefit for the buyer is brought up by Brent Kabat, social studies teacher at Olympia High School. “There is no benefit to saying ‘now I can be a citizen,’” Kabat stated, and that “Rich people are fine anywhere in the world.”
The only possible benefits that Trump proposed were citizenship and not being taxed on income outside of the United States. However, in his address to congress on March 4, 2025, one of the main points was that it would bring taxpayers into the country, contradicting the initial promise.
Why?
The overall idea is to decrease the country’s national debt by bringing in more job opportunities and businesses. However, some data and past examples show that this is most likely not going to be the case.
Similar situations like this have occurred in other countries. For example, there exists a Spanish golden visa, providing citizenship for those who invest $500,000 in real estate for Spain. This program is soon to be shut down in April 2025 due to it having a negative impact on the housing market.
There has also been evidence that Trump’s hope of selling nearly $5 trillion worth of gold cards is most likely not going to happen. From data taken in 2022, throughout the entire year only 8,000 people received visas from the current EB-5 Investor program, short of the million that is needed for Trump’s promised impact.
Michael Schaefer, US history teacher at Olympia High School, states that this goal is not reasonable. Trump is “throwing that out there to try to get the American public to buy in to the fact that you’re letting people buy their way into the country,” Schaefer said.
How?
Not only is the goal unrealistic, but it might not even be possible. This entire decision to replace the EB-5 program has to pass through legislative decisions before even happening. The program was originally made by Congress in 1990, and what is being seen right now is “a stretch of executive authority, to try to do Congress’ job,” Schaefer said.
So far there has not been any implementation of the “gold card,” nor any official date on when they would be sold. The only plan for their release was a statement from Trump on February 25, 2025, claiming that the “gold card” would be sold in about two weeks.