The U.S. government has the ability to have approximately 1.1 million permanent resident cards in the current fiscal year, and these residents will be classified into categories of family members, workers with advanced skills and other groups based on precise rules.
Lutnick initially proposed Trump’s gold medal as one of the alternatives, called the EB-5 investor visa, which is perhaps the closest gold visa to the United States at present.
The program was created by Congress in 1990 and currently allows approximately 10,000 foreigners to invest $1.05 million in the U.S. every year (or $800,000 in rural areas and hiring troubled areas) to support at least 10 full-time jobs.
When the plan was initially formulated, experts say lawmakers went out of their way to ensure it was not seen as a way for corrupt oligarchs to unfairly buy the United States. Part of this effort is to ensure that immigration authorities carefully evaluate each EB-5 application to verify that investment funds do not come from illegal or unpleasant sources.
“The entire USCIS department is full of economists and national security experts,” said Doug Rand, a former senior consultant at Biden Administration, who was once at USCIS. “There was so much paperwork related to the EB-5 petition during his tenure in the government that the towering archives caused the floor inside the USCIS headquarters to sag.
It is not clear whether the same review will be applied to the gold card program. When asked in a February briefing whether Russian oligarchs are eligible, Trump said: “Yes, maybe, hey, I know some Russian oligarchs are very good people.”
Advocates of the existing EB-5 program say it is mostly used by ordinary immigrants who have saved for years to invest in U.S. real estate developments and other businesses and hope to make money one day. In other words, it’s not that a group of people can usually pay $5 million for gold cards and never see that money again.
“Most people who are trying to use the EB-5 program as a pathway to green card and citizenship do not have that money,” EB5 Group CEO Brad Sher told Wired. “They are mainly working class people, they work hard to save money, and they often use most of their savings to come up with investments to take advantage of EB-5.” (Sher added that he supports Trump’s gold card, although he hopes it can coexist with the EB-5 visa).
In its initial Oval Office briefing on February 25, Lutnick said the gold card program will be launched in about two weeks. In a podcast interview published a month later on March 20, he also claimed the project was just around the corner. “It’s about two weeks from today,” Lutnik said. Whether it’s ready, and if so, when it will be announced is still unknown.
Matt Giles and Zeyi Yang’s other reports.
