Trump's $5-million 'gold card' visa might never happen
He told the Financial Times in mid-June that 70,000 people have signed up to learn more about the card.
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Lutnick has said the idea for the gold card came from hedge fund manager John Paulson, who spoke with Trump and Lutnick about the project. Elon Musk's U.S. DOGE Service played a key role in organizing that effort, including standing up a website that advertises 'The Trump Card Is Coming,' according to records obtained by The Washington Post and a Department of Homeland Security official familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal discussions. The website instructs visitors to enter their name, email address and region to 'be notified the moment access opens.'
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In mid-April, DOGE representatives Edward Coristine and Marko Elez asked employees at DHS and the State Department to quickly set up a system that would pass gold card visa applicants' data among different parts of DHS, the records show. The data that would be transferred was sensitive, detailing applicants' names, birth dates, places of residence and other personal information, the records show.
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The DHS team finished setting up its requested data transfer pipeline in less than a week, the employee said, then settled in to wait for applicants. But as of late June, not a single application had come along on a webpage for the visa application, which isn't public, the employee said.
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Lutnick told Axios in late May that the website would roll out in a week, and details about the visas would come out 'over a matter of the next weeks; not months, weeks.'
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Around the world, other countries that had once offered similar costly green cards have reversed course after controversies over granting rich people unfettered residency and the fallout from that, said Kate Hooper, a senior policy analyst for the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. For instance, Spain ended its golden visa after an explosion in housing prices fuelled by wealthy buyers.
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'There's been a bit of a backlash to that … the optics of selling citizenship and worries about due diligence,' Hooper said.
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Hooper, who studies the gold visa programs globally, said the U.S. proposal would be the most expensive one out there if it were feasible. Wealthy foreigners who want to spend less could easily acquire a visa to several Caribbean island nations for a fraction of the cost Trump has proposed. For instance, Antigua and Barbuda requires a contribution of $230,000 to a national development fund for a visa.
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It is also unclear how many people would be interested in pursuing a U.S. gold card. EB-5 visas, which require investments of either $800,000 or $1.05 million, creating at least 10 jobs, are allocated to 10,000 foreigners a year.
The UBS Global Wealth Report for this year estimated many of the world's millionaires already live in the U.S., and there may be about 33.5 million people outside of the U.S. with at least $1 million. The report didn't specify how many of those foreign millionaires might already have legal access to the U.S. and how many have more than $5 million.
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