Photo Credit: Getty Images
President Donald Trump announced Tuesday his administration's plan to launch a new "Trump Gold Card" visa program, replacing the existing EB-5 investor visa system established in 1990.
"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 stated during an Oval Office briefing.
The new program dramatically increases the investment requirement from roughly $1 million to $5 million per applicant. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who joined Trump for the announcement, criticized the current system as being "full of nonsense and make-believe and fraud."
"We're going to end the EB-5 program and we're going to replace it with the Trump gold card," Lutnick explained, adding that recipients would be "fully vetted" to ensure they are "wonderful world class global citizens."
Unlike green cards, the gold card would offer what Trump described as "green card privileges plus" with a pathway to citizenship. The EB-5 program currently requires creating at least 10 jobs, though Trump made no mention of job creation requirements for the new program.
Trump suggested the initiative could be implemented without congressional approval, though citizenship pathways typically require legislative action. "We don't need Congress... It's a path to citizenship, a very strong path to citizenship, but we're not doing citizenship. For that I'd have to get Congress," he noted.
The president speculated ambitiously about the program's potential scale, suggesting it could generate substantial revenue. "You're getting big taxpayers, big job producers, and we'll be able to sell maybe a million of these cards, maybe more than that," Trump said, even floating a figure of $55 trillion in potential revenue.
When asked about eligible nationalities, Trump indicated Russian citizens could qualify. "I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people," he remarked. "They're not quite as wealthy as they used to be."
The Homeland Security Department reports approximately 8,000 investors received EB-5 visas in the 2021-2022 period. According to Henley & Partners, over 100 countries worldwide offer similar "golden visa" programs to wealthy individuals.
The administration plans to launch the program within two weeks, positioning it as both an immigration pathway for the wealthy and a deficit reduction measure through the substantial fees collected.
