President Donald Trump speaks at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, on Feb. 18. (Pool / AP)
By Jack Davis February 26, 2025 at 11:18am
For the foreigner who has everything — except American citizenship — President Donald Trump has unveiled a glittering new option.
Trump on Tuesday teased the creation of a new program that would allow wealthy foreign nationals — or companies that want to bring in foreign nationals — the option of a path to citizenship for $5 million, according to The Washington Times.
The new program would replace a current visa classification called EB-5 in which a visa can be had for, generally, investing $1 million in a job-creating project.
“We’re going to be selling a gold card. You have a green card; this is a gold card,” Trump said,
“We’re going to be putting a price on that card of about $5 million, and that’s going to give you green card privileges, plus it’s going to be a route to citizenship.”
Trump said that people who fork over the $5 million will 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,” he said.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said it was time to reform the EB-5 program, according to Reuters.
“The EB-5 program … it was full of nonsense, make believe and fraud, and it was a way to get a green card that was low price,” he said.
“So the president said, rather than having this sort of ridiculous EB-5 program, we’re going to end the EB-5 program. We’re going to replace it with the Trump gold card,” Lutnick explained.
Do you support the immigration “gold card”?
Trump said, he thought up to 10 million gold cards could be sold, helping to reduce the federal deficit, according to the Associated Press.
The gold card program “could be great, maybe it will be fantastic,” Trump said.
“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,” Trump said.
Once again, Trump is the expert of thinking of things we had no idea we could do.
Now, he’s offering to sell U.S. “gold cards” to wealthy foreigners for $5,000,000 in return for entry into the U.S.
If just 200 rich people take this, that’s $1 BILLION.pic.twitter.com/Vtssqu0de7
— George (@BehizyTweets) February 25, 2025
AP noted that visas for megabucks investors are offered in nations that include Great Britain, Spain, Greece, Malta, Australia, Canada and Italy.
About 8,000 people obtained EB-5 visas in the 2022 federal fiscal year.
Lutnick said not everyone will be eligible, according to The Hill.
“They’ll have to go through vetting, of course, to make sure they’re wonderful world class global citizens, they can come to America. President can give them a green card, and they can invest in America, and we can use that money to reduce our deficit,” he said.
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