President Donald Trump announced a new path to U.S. citizenship: a gold card.
The U.S. is going to be “selling” gold cards for a price of $5 million, Trump said in the Oval Office Tuesday.
“We’re going to be putting a price on that card of about $5 million and that’s going to give you Green Card privileges, plus it’s going to be a route to citizenship,” the president said.
“Wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card,” he continued. 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 and never been done before.”
Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Commerce, clarified the Trump administration plans to terminate the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program and “replace it with the Trump gold card.”
The EB-5 program allows investors to apply for permanent residence in the U.S. if they “make the necessary investment in a commercial enterprise in the United States” and plan to create or preserve 10 permanent full-time jobs.
The EB-5 program was “full of nonsense, make-believe and fraud,” Lutnick continued. “It was a way to get a green card that was low priced.”
Once vetted, gold card holders “can invest in America and we can use that money to reduce our deficit,” he added.
The president predicted that the gold card will bring in “very high level people” who create jobs. With these cards, “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.
