For world's wealthy, a 'gold card' path to American citizenship is almost here
WASHINGTON- The Statue of Liberty may soon need a new inscription : "Give us your rich, your wealthy, your high net-worth individuals yearning to breathe free."
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced Thursday that the “ gold card” visa, which gives wealthy foreigners a path to citizenship, would be available within a “week, week-and-a-half.”
Lutnick, who was attending President Donald Trump’s cabinet meeting at the White House, gave the status update one week after the president showed off the physical card on Air Force One.
The gold-colored card, emblazoned with a likeness of Trump’s face, offers a path to citizenship to foreigners after paying $5 million to the government.
“I’m very excited that within a week-and-a-half we’re going to start with the gold card and the Trump card – it’s coming out, and we’re excited about that, and that’s coming soon," Lutnick said on Thursday.
"We are going to be selling a gold card," Trump as he first floated the idea in February. "We are going to be putting a price on that card of about $5 million.”
Trump said it would replace the "EB-5" immigrant investor green card visa program, which allows immigrant investors the option to invest between $800,000 and $1.05 million that help create or preserve U.S. jobs to become permanent residents.
“Wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card,” he said in February. “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.”
Trump has said that he is not seeking approval from Congress as he is not providing them with citizenship but only a path to citizenship.
David Bier, an expert on legal immigration, border security, and interior enforcement at the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank, said the move would be “totally illegal.”
“Only Congress can create new green card categories, and a president cannot add or eliminate a green card category via executive order,” Bier said. “Congress would need to amend the immigration laws and the tax code to implement this idea.”
In terms of possible lawsuits, Bier said he wasn’t sure “who could plausibly claim to be harmed by millionaires immigrating.” Still, people who are applying under current rules and whose applications are blocked could theoretically sue, he said.
Trump has described the card as “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,” he said.
Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy is a White House correspondent for USA TODAY. You can follow her on X @SwapnaVenugopal
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick: 'gold card' visas only a week away
