Trump's $5 Million Gold Card Visa Plan: Why experts say it may never become a reality
The ambitious
Trump Gold Card visa
programme, touted as a potential economic gamechanger and a shortcut to U.S. residency for wealthy foreigners, may never move beyond a campaign concept, according to leading immigration experts and legal analysts. Despite high-profile endorsements and repeated declarations of an imminent rollout, the initiative currently lacks legal backing, operational structure, and a realistic applicant base, stakeholders have said, as mentioned in a report by Forbes.
A Concept Without a Framework
Marketed as a $5 million entryway into the United States—complete with residency rights, a citizenship track, and possible tax advantages—the Donald Trump Gold Card visa was introduced earlier this year by U.S. President Donald Trump and his ally, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
The proposal suggests it could replace the existing
EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program
, which currently allows foreign nationals to gain residency through investments of $800,000 to $1 million and job creation requirements.
However, immigration experts point out that no legislation has been introduced, nor are there details of a formal structure. 'There is no real programme, no enabling law—just a marketing pitch,' said Nuri Katz, founder of Apex Capital Partners, who has advised ultra-high-net-worth individuals on immigration for over three decades.
Katz stressed that the U.S. Congress would have to enact new immigration and tax laws before any such programme could take effect.
Live Events
Trump's Vision: Ambitious but Impractical?
President Trump has floated numbers as high as $50 trillion in potential revenue, claiming the sale of 10 million Gold Cards would more than erase the national debt. Lutnick has since tempered the projections, suggesting $1 trillion in revenue from 200,000 applicants. But analysts remain skeptical.
'The math simply doesn't support the vision,' Katz told reporters. 'In my experience, investors rarely commit more than 10% of their net worth to an immigration programme. So unless an individual is worth $100 million or more, they won't even consider this.'
According to a Henley & Partners report, there are fewer than 30,000 non-American centimillionaires worldwide—far fewer than the figures being pitched by the administration.
Legal and Technical Barriers Persist
The programme's digital infrastructure has also drawn criticism. Although a website—trumpcard.gov—was expected to go live this month, visitors are instead met with a placeholder page and malfunctioning registration prompts. The Department of Commerce has not provided clarity on when or whether the site will officially launch.
According to the American Immigration Lawyers Association, no U.S. President can unilaterally create or alter visa categories. The current EB-5 programme, reauthorized through 2027, would remain in place unless Congress amends existing law.
Skepticism Mounts Among Wealth Managers
Katz, who advises international clients, said he would not recommend participation to any investor under current conditions. 'Without legislation and regulatory clarity, even submitting personal information on a website could pose risks. We don't know where that data would end up,' he warned.
In a telling moment, Katz dismissed Lutnick's recent claim that 1,000 Gold Cards were sold in one day—allegedly generating $5 billion—as 'implausible and unserious.'
Origins in a Conversation, Not Policy
The genesis of the Trump Gold Card idea reportedly came from hedge fund manager John Paulson, who suggested monetising visas during a conversation with Trump. 'Why do we give them away? We should sell them,' Paulson allegedly said, prompting Lutnick to develop the proposal. But translating a dinner-table idea into federal immigration policy, experts say, will require more than bravado and branding.
FAQs
What is the Trump Gold Card visa programme?
It's a proposed visa initiative by U.S. President Donald Trump, offering U.S. residency and a path to citizenship to wealthy foreigners in exchange for a $5 million investment.
Has the programme been officially launched?
No. As of now, it remains a concept without a legal framework or legislative backing, according to immigration and legal experts.
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Time of India
26 minutes ago
- Time of India
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Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Opaque Semi-Transparent Text Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Caption Area Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Drop shadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. In terms of flows, whenever there is a reduction in the tariff risk sentiment, we see flows coming to the US, otherwise we are seeing flows going largely to Europe and to Japan. Some amount coming into emerging markets as well, that also we are seeing. 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Write me an email, write a thank you and put this and immediately it comes, but it costs a lot at the back end.
Economic Times
26 minutes ago
- Economic Times
No betting on market till July; AI companies to take a couple of years to take off in India: Ajay Bagga
Ajay Bagga, Market Expert, says Agentic software adoption is growing, with Microsoft leading across platforms, which Indian companies are poised to capitalize. Economic headwinds in China and the US may impact IT spending, necessitating productivity and cost optimization through AI. Data centers are crucial for AI's expansion, presenting opportunities for utility companies and well-funded startups, especially those integrating solar power and storage solutions. ADVERTISEMENT What is your view on the markets because some people hold the view that this year markets could be tough. You have to be selective if you want to make money. What is your assessment? Ajay Bagga: All bets are off till July. July 9th is an important date as the tariff agreements start coming in that will help market sentiment. A 12-month view is quite strong. We will be quite okay on a 12-month basis. For the next 40-45 days, we have to wait and watch. 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But firstly, how do you see the whole chatter around the AI transition because some of the experts also highlight that whenever we have witnessed a technology transition, the Indian companies have adopted it very well but at a later stage. Help us with your assessment of the AI boom because some of the US and even Chinese companies are taking the leap. How will Indian players transition to that? Ajay Bagga: It is catching up. You are getting the end use cases. Agentic software is being launched. A lot of it will be how Microsoft is approaching it, where they have put their software on every cloud platform. They are not only limiting themselves to Azure, but they are going across a lot of platforms and giving end use solutions to customers for that. I think Indian companies will jump start that. We will see a lot of that coming in. But the big issue is the Chinese slowdown and the US looming slowdown. We are looking at 0.5% growth in the US for this year, next year 1.6% as against about a 2.5% growth that the last three years were seeing. There is some amount of slowdown in the US and what gets cut is first marketing and then software development and that is what our companies are facing. We have to have a strong productivity push or a cost cut push that we are optimising or are reducing employment by bringing in AI agents. We have not transitioned to those kinds of things yet and nobody in the world has brought that singularity into AI yet. ADVERTISEMENT The agents are very poor in comprehension and in offering solutions. Wherever the customer can enter the data, as happens in finance which we have done and our IT companies enabled that over the last 30 years, that was a big change, like earlier customers would walk into a branch, it was costing you Rs 200-300 to serve a customer. Then, we took it to the phones. It became Rs 10-12. Then, we brought it online, when it became customer-centered. Today we are all making our own payments, we are all enabling our accounts to pay our utility bills, the cost has gone out of the banks totally and it is all reconciled, it is all done automatically, it has happened from industry to industry, so that was the boom over the last 30 years that our IT did. AI is just starting. So, right now the picks and shovel companies like Nvidia who make the chips are doing well. ADVERTISEMENT The next level is who sets up the data centre and the power suppliers for them. Power suppliers to those data centres will do well. Third is companies which bring the end use, but then the end user has to be ready for it, has to be able to fund it. They are not finding it so much right now. Another trend I am seeing is the GCC trend. Since there are now 2,900 captive and third party GCCs running in India, all our companies are looking at funding and manning that and offering that kind of service which is easier than AI. AI will be the big one, but maybe it will take another two years before we start seeing that difference coming on the revenues and the profit front. Though data centres are long-term stories, do you find good opportunities in the listed space for specifically Indian companies? Though a lot of companies are now talking about the data centre theme, how will it contribute? Some of these are MNCs and some of the companies came out with the recent earnings as well, but do you have much confidence there that these companies will be able to deliver? Are there enough players in the listed space? Ajay Bagga: Not enough. There are a few who are talking about it. We have not really seen that getting translated yet. But there will be utility level companies which will come in. So, running a data centre is not necessarily an IT company kind of a work, but it helps them to gain clients to have that capacity, like the Government of India mentioned they are going to buy some 12,000 more GPU chips for the Indian stack, for the weather programme and private players also linked into defence. ADVERTISEMENT That way data centres will be done by the large corporates in the country and the well-funded startups will be able to do it. It is a crying need. It will happen. And if you can link it up to solar along with storage, like last week we had a few days where the incremental cost on the electric exchanges went to zero because solar was really performing in the heat. We are going to see weekends where you will get a surge of free power coming in. If you can store that, along with data centres, that will become a business model. So, there are some players, I would not like to name them, but one has not seen on the ground movement coming through yet, but when it happens, it will be very big. Everyone will use AI. And we take it very simply like I was told by a Harvard professor, make sure whenever you are using any of these tools, you are thanking them because in 10 years the machine will remember who was rude and who was saying the please and thank yous. But then, OpenAI came out and said it is costing them millions of dollars every time you are saying thank you to AI or this craze of creating portraits is costing so much data centre capacity, so much cooling capacity, so much power, which we do not realise. We are asking AI to write our emails. That day I was talking to one of the doctoral guides. They had sent me a thesis to read and then they called me very fast and said, sir do not waste your time. I said, what happened? They have this software which tracks if the thesis has been pirated from somewhere or plagiarized and they said 92% of the thesis is written by ChatGPT, so do not waste your time. We are asking the student to rewrite it. So, we are seeing things like that happen and all at the back of it will be data centres. So, you need, they will be like electricity. You will need data centres to process all this. We take it very simply. Write me an email, write a thank you and put this and immediately it comes, but it costs a lot at the back end. (You can now subscribe to our ETMarkets WhatsApp channel)
Economic Times
26 minutes ago
- Economic Times
Gold prices to witness big moves, may hit Rs 1.10 lakh/10g in one year. Is now the time to buy?
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