Trump launches $5 million 'gold card' as a trail to US citizenship
President Donald Trump said that he formulates to offer a “gold card” visa with a path to citizenship for $5 million, cutting out a 35-year-old EB - 5 business 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 Tuesday in the Oval Office.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick observed 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. The Congressional Research Service reported in 2021 that EB-5 visas pose risks of fraud, including verification that funds were obtained legally. 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.
The EB-5 visa program, however, was created by an act of Congress in 1990, and it is unclear whether Trump has the authority to do away with it or to establish a new visa program without congressional action.
"We have it all worked out from the legal standpoint. It's totally legal to do," Trump said. Golden visas are often bought by citizens of countries like China and Russia who want to relocate to places like Western Europe. Many countries don’t require full-time residency to secure the visa.

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