Donald Trump is clamping down on poor immigrants entering America. But for rich ones he is rolling out the red carpet. Replacing an existing scheme offering green cards to foreigners who invest in US businesses, the president has outlined a plan to sell “gold cards” for $5mn each that will provide permanent residency. Trump has said applicants will be wealthy, successful, spend a lot of money, and pay a lot of taxes. He said the scheme would provide a route to citizenship, though details remain hazy. What is clear is that the president aims to deploy a potentially powerful new weapon in the worldwide battle to attract the rich and their cash.
For Trump, the plan is a showy stunt and a policy shift. In his first term, he had to satisfy a mostly Maga base that opposed both low- and high-skilled migration. But the tycoons who have joined his coalition in his second term want to be able to import top talent. Splits have emerged on the issue between Maga and the billionaires. Trump says his plan would be a way to bring in “very high-level people”, and companies such as Apple could buy cards for high-skilled workers.
The idea seems to reflect, too, the president’s own fascination with wealth and desire to entice super-rich incomers who will splash their money around. It could, in theory, be a big revenue earner, especially if not subject to the same limits as the EB-5 programme it would replace — which is capped at 10,000 visas a year, with no country receiving more than 7 per cent. That scheme offers green cards to those who invest at least $800,000 or $1.05mn into a new enterprise, depending on the area, and create at least 10 jobs. Trump’s gold card seems to involve paying the $5mn directly to the government. He casually suggested the US could sell a million or more cards.
That may be sufficient for the president not to look too closely into the potential downsides. As the OECD has noted, while “golden visa” schemes can spur growth they are also attractive to “criminals and corrupt officials seeking to evade justice and launder the proceeds of crime”. The EB-5 programme has suffered from such problems in the past. Some of the biggest users of schemes elsewhere have been wealthy expats from China — which the Trump administration views as its biggest foreign policy and economic threat — and Russia. Trump says some Russian oligarchs could “possibly” be eligible for the US gold cards, though Howard Lutnick, US commerce secretary, says applicants will “have to go through vetting, of course”.
Over in the EU, where a golden visa allows travel across the 29-country Schengen area, concerns over security and corruption — and in some locations the role of investment schemes in pushing up property prices — have led to schemes largely being cut back, not expanded, in recent years. Ireland scrapped its golden visa scheme in 2023 and Portugal revamped its version to remove property as a qualifying investment. Spain is closing its scheme from April.
Elsewhere, Australia has scrapped golden visas, too. But in places such as the United Arab Emirates schemes are going strong, and New Zealand is loosening rules on its golden visas in an effort to attract more wealthy investors.
There are still questions over whether Trump can replace the EB-5 programme with his gold card without going through Congress, as he claims, and implement it without riling his base. But if the US president is stepping up efforts to woo the wealthy, this looks an even less propitious moment for Britain, for example, to be driving away rich “non-doms” by cutting tax breaks. As with so many elements of Trump’s agenda, other countries are left fumbling with how to respond.