U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday, February 25, 2025, that he intends to replace a 35-year-old investment visa with a $5 million “gold card” visa that offers a road to citizenship. “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,” Mr. Trump said in the Oval Office.
In two weeks, the “Trump Gold Card” will take the place of EB-5 visas, according to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Congress established EB-5s in 1990 to encourage foreign investment, and they are available to anyone who invests roughly $1 million in a business with at least 10 employees. According to Mr. Lutnick, the gold card, which is truly a green card or permanent legal residency, would increase the cost of admittance for investors and eliminate the “nonsense” and fraud that he claimed define the EB-5 program. It would come with a route to citizenship, much like other green cards.
As per the latest Yearbook of Immigration Statistics published by the Homeland Security Department, around 8,000 individuals were granted investor visas for the 12-month period that concluded on September 30, 2022. According to a 2021 research by the Congressional Research Service, EB-5 visas carry fraud risks, such as the need to confirm that the money was obtained lawfully. Visas for investors are widely used worldwide. According to the advice firm Henley and Partners, over 100 nations worldwide, including the US, UK, Spain, Greece, Malta, Australia, Canada, and Italy, provide affluent people “golden visas.”
The conditions for creating jobs were not mentioned by Mr. Trump. Additionally, Mr. Trump suggested that the federal government sell 10 million “gold cards” in order to lower the deficit, even though the number of EB-5 visas is limited. 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.
Congress determines qualifications for citizenship, but Mr. Trump said “gold cards” would not require congressional approval.
