President Donald Trump has proposed a new visa program that would allow wealthy foreign investors to obtain a pathway to US citizenship by paying $5 million, potentially replacing the existing EB-5 investor visa program.
During a Cabinet meeting, Trump described the proposed “gold card” as a potential revenue generator. “I happen to think it’ll sell like crazy. It’s a market,” Trump said. He suggested the program could help reduce national debt, claiming, “If we sell a million, that’s $5 trillion dollars.”
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick described the current EB-5 program as having been “poorly overseen, poorly executed.” The existing program offers US visas to investors who spend about $1 million on a company that employs at least 10 people. The US Homeland Security Department reported approximately 8,000 investor visas were issued in the 12-month period ending September 30, 2022.
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The proposed program would differ significantly from the current EB-5 visa. Lutnick suggested the gold card would raise the price of admission for investors and eliminate fraud that characterized the previous program.
Trump said that participants for his gold card would 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.” He claimed that “no other country can do this because people don’t want to go to other countries. They want to come here.”
In reality, over 100 countries, including Australia, Canada, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Malta, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom, already offer so-called golden visa programs to wealthy individuals and investors.
Trump indicated that the new visa would provide a pathway to citizenship and would involve a vetting process still being developed. When asked about potential country-specific restrictions, like China and Iran, Trump suggested the program would likely not “be restricted too much in terms of countries, but maybe in terms of individuals.”
Trump described the program as “somewhat like a green card, but at a higher level of sophistication.” He envisioned a system where “companies will pay for people to get in and to have long, long term status in the country.”
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