Touted as a way to raise revenue, a “gold card” visa program announced by President Donald Trump last month would require a $5 million payment in exchange for permanent residency and a pathway to citizenship.
While the astronomical price tag is the most eye-catching aspect of the proposal, it diverges from similar offerings like the EB-5 investor visa in that the fee can be paid on behalf of somebody else and would also seemingly exempt recipients from having to pay taxes on income earned overseas.
The gold card’s primary purpose is to create a new revenue stream large enough to offset the estimated $4.5 trillion increase in new deficits under the administration’s proposed budget. Trump has set an ambitious goal to sell 1 million gold cards, which would generate $5 trillion for the government.
Apart from the fiscal benefits, during his March 4 address to Congress, Trump also touted the gold card as a way to ensure the U.S. attracts and retains wealthy immigrants despite the administration’s sweeping crackdown on illegal immigration.
While details are sparse ahead of a tentative launch date in March, the information that is available bodes poorly for the gold card’s chances of successful and speedy implementation.
What is the precedent for the gold card, and how have similar visa programs fared?
The gold card was first presented as taking the place of the EB-5 investor visa program, which allocates roughly 10,000 visas—the first step to getting a green card that allows permanent legal residency—each year for individuals who make an $1.05 million investment (with a provision allowing for a lower $800,000 investment in “targeted employment areas”) that creates or saves 10 American jobs.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who appears to be one of the main architects of the gold card proposal, characterized the EB-5 in his remarks as “full of nonsense, make believe, and fraud.” Since then, the administration has indicated that while the EB-5 will be restructured, it will remain in place alongside the new gold card program.
The EB-5 was most recently modified by Congress through the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022, or RIA. The RIA gave the Department of Homeland Security better oversight tools, strengthened the vetting process by requiring background checks for a greater range of individuals involved in EB-5 investment projects, and created an “EB-5 Integrity Fund” to support compliance investigations.
Criticisms of the EB-5’s potential for fraud are thus not new, and while the EB-5 was an avenue for some high-profile fraud cases the overall rate of proven fraud was rare even before the reforms were passed. In the last quarter of fiscal year 2024 only 3 percent of EB-5 petitions filed after RIA were denied, indicating that even with increased scrutiny most applicants and investment projects meet the necessary criteria.
One reason the EB-5 program seems to be safe for now is that interest in it is on the rise. Fiscal year 2024 saw the greatest number of applications for EB-5 visas since 2020, and one analysis estimates that the EB-5 needs a 30 percent increase in the number of visas it has in order to keep up with demand. This excess demand could theoretically be diverted towards the gold card program instead.
What new concerns does the gold card raise?
The administration will struggle to balance its desired speed of implementation with the rigor of vetting necessary to ensure the gold card program does not create any national security risks—especially since a large number of applicants will be from China.
In 2024, about 70 percent of all EB-5 applications came from Chinese nationals. China also has the second largest number of millionaires in the world, surpassed only by the U.S. itself. The gold card will thus need to draw heavily from the Chinese business class to meet its fiscal targets.
This will become a significant complication for the program as it could become a way for China to skirt key U.S. restrictions. For example, the Senate is currently poised to advance a bipartisan bill banning Chinese enterprises and individuals from buying land near U.S. military bases. But with the gold card, wealthy Chinese individuals connected to the Chinese Communist Party would be able to evade these bans by first acquiring U.S. citizenship.
Unlike the EB-5, which requires a personal investment and gives visas only to the investor and the investor’s spouse and minor children, the gold card can be purchased on behalf of someone else, so it will require more careful vetting of both the funder and the beneficiary.
On a domestic level, the gold card also seems poised to create a rift within the Republican Party. As the party turns increasingly skeptical of globalism and even legal immigration, selling American citizenship to the world’s wealthy elite and granting them the ability to wield greater influence on American politics could be met with resistance. For example, a European millionaire could hypothetically secure a gold card and then use it to get around Federal Election Commission restrictions on political spending by foreign nationals to advocate for progressive causes.
If the gold card program does wind up providing tax exemptions for recipients on income earned outside of the U.S., it would also create a two-tiered system where gold card holders enjoy a more privileged level of citizenship than natural-born Americans, who are subject to tax on such income.
On top of these issues, the gold card will almost certainly falter in its core mission of creating a significant new stream of government revenue.
Is the gold card program likely to reduce the national debt?
The gold card cannot be projected to generate $5 trillion in revenue—Trump’s stated goal—under any reasonable set of assumptions.
According to the Henley & Partners 2024 Global Wealth Migration Report, an estimated 135,000 millionaires will move to a new country in 2025. If historical trends hold, the U.S. can expect to attract a little more than 3 percent of that flow, or about 4,000 millionaires.
Even if the U.S. somehow sold every single millionaire estimated to move in 2025 a gold card, this would come out to only $675 billion dollars, and many millionaires aren’t wealthy enough to afford a $5 million flat payment. The gold card program would therefore need to rely on very high net-worth individuals and corporations willing to pay the fee on behalf of an applicant in order to drum up the target revenue, but both of these also have significant limitations. There are only 29,350 people in the world with a net worth of more than $100 million, and a third of them already live in the United States. For their part, corporations have little incentive to pay such a high amount for an employee who would otherwise be tied to working for them through a similar and far less expensive pathway like the H-1B visa.
While these financial obstacles are daunting, they pale in comparison to the ones the gold card faces for becoming law to begin with.
How might the administration implement the gold card?
Creating the gold card visa would require an act of Congress. Under the U.S. Constitution and immigration laws, only Congress can establish new immigrant visa categories or modify the criteria for issuing green cards. The EB-5 program itself was created by statute as part of the Immigration Act of 1990.
The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) sets annual numerical limits and eligibility rules for immigrant visas. The EB-5 investor visa is part of the employment-based immigration quota (capped at roughly 10,000 visas for investors each year, out of 140,000 employment-based visas). Issuing 1 million gold cards would go far beyond these existing limits. Unless Congress amends the INA to create a separate uncapped category or significantly raise caps, the administration simply cannot issue unlimited green cards.
The Trump administration might attempt interim measures, but each faces legal limitations. For example, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does have authority to set certain regulations for the EB-5 program, such as adjusting investment amounts for inflation, and in 2019 DHS raised the minimum investment from $500,000 to $900,000 by regulation. However, transforming EB-5 into the “gold card” by raising the minimum to $5 million, scrapping the job requirement, and redirecting funds to the U.S. Treasury would almost certainly exceed the statutory authority of DHS.
Another option, as discussed by David Bier of the Cato Institute, would be for DHS to try to use its parole authority or other non-immigrant visa categories to approximate a gold card visa program. For instance, the administration might set up a parole program for investors who contribute $5 million, allowing them to live and work in the U.S. temporarily as a “significant public benefit.” The Obama administration did something similar on a smaller scale with the International Entrepreneur Rule, using parole to admit startup founders. However, parole is not permanent residency and does not confer a path to citizenship or a green card, and would likely generate little interest as a result. The Trump administration also has abolished Biden-era parole programs by claiming that the use of categorical parole exceeds its intended purpose.
All together, the gold card is a creative proposal with ambitions that far exceed its practical, political, and legal constraints.
