President Donald Trump previewed a plan Tuesday to launch a ‘gold card’ program for wealthy immigrants who wanted to work into the United States, even offering them a path to citizenship if they qualified.
The president said the card would replace the current EB-5 visa program and would cost about $5 million dollars per person.
‘We’re going to be selling a gold card. You have a green card. This is a gold card,’ Trump said to reporters in the Oval Office.
He described the new ‘gold card’ program as ‘green card privileges plus’ that would offer recipients a ‘route to citizenship’ in the United States.
‘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,’ he said, boasting that it had ‘never been done before.’
He previewed the program as ready to launch in ‘two weeks.’
United States Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said the ‘gold card’ program would replace the current EB-5 visa program that he criticized was ‘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 said.
He said recipients of the gold card would be fully vetted.
‘We’re going to make sure they’re wonderful world class global citizens,’ he added.
Lutnick added that the steep fee from the gold card would help reduce the federal deficit.
He said that ‘gold cards’ would not be distributed by a lottery system, that is currently part of the visa distribution.
‘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.
He predicted the program could raise up to $55 trillion in revenue if it became a popular solution for foreign investment.
‘It could be great, maybe it will be fantastic,’ Trump said.
He said the visa programs should be more sophisticated to make sure the United States was making money.
‘Why should we give them away?’ he asked.
Trump said the executive branch could essentially create the program outside of Congress.
‘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 said.