Citizenship For Sale: Trump’s $5M ‘Gold Card’ Visa Seems Designed To Install A Rich Foreign Overclass

What does it mean to be an American? We all have different answers to that question.

I’ve read a lot of history and thought a lot about it, so maybe my response is as good as any. I would say Americans believe that we all should have the opportunity, through the strength of our backs and the sweat of our brows and the power of our intellects, to build something for ourselves. No monarch, no nobleman, no archbishop, no tycoon gets to command us on how we are going to live our lives. We all, collectively, get to choose our leaders. We have rights, and we recognize the rights of our fellow Americans, even when we disagree with them.

Or, I guess, you can just buy your way in no matter what you believe and regardless of how you acquired your money. At least that’s what Donald Trump is proposing with his new $5 million “gold card” visa for rich immigrants.

“If we sell a million, that’s $5 trillion,” Trump said of this proposal during the first Cabinet meeting of his second term. Look, don’t blame me if you don’t like the wording: Trump himself said he wants to “sell” American citizenship, repeatedly. “I think we will sell a lot,” Trump added.

A whole lot, apparently. Trump speculated that the federal government could sell as many as 10 million of his “gold card” visas for rich immigrants and use the proceeds to offset the deficit. “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,” Trump went on.

The United States, along with more than 100 other countries around the globe, does currently offer investor visas under limited circumstances for wealthy immigrants who will create jobs upon their arrival. The EB-5 visa, which Trump says his “gold card” visa will replace, requires immigrant investors to invest a minimum of approximately $1 million in an American company that employs at least 10 people. The EB-5 program requires verification that funds were obtained legally (which is, admittedly, a difficult thing to verify), and unlike Trump’s proposed “gold card” visa, does not automatically include any pathway to citizenship. A limited number of EB-5 visas — in fiscal year 2022, for example, about 8,000 people obtained them — are available.

When asked whether there would be restrictions on Chinese or Iranian nationals purchasing citizenship through the “gold card” visa program, Trump indicated there would not be many restrictions in terms of country of origin. When asked whether he might sell citizenship to Russian oligarchs through the “gold card” visa program, Trump said, “Yeah, possibly. I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people.”

Doesn’t it sound fantastic to you to import an extremely wealthy overclass of 10 million foreigners into this country who cheated, stole, murdered, or (even worse) inherited their way to fortune so we can all serve them? Let’s maybe Make America Victorian England Again. MAVEA? We’ll work on that.

Look, I’m not here to necessarily defend the existing EB-5 program or any of the other legal means through which America has welcomed immigrants to her shores over the years. What I am saying is that just selling American citizenship to anyone who rolls up with a briefcase full of $5 million in cash is wrong.

Consider, for a moment, why anyone who made $5 million abroad in a legitimate fashion would want to surrender it in order to come here. You might think, if such a person’s fortune wasn’t balanced on a knife edge because it came from drugs or money laundering or anything else that left them in a state of precarity at home, that they would want to stay where they were and keep reaping the benefits of whatever country they are in that has already been very good to them. Immigrants generally want to come to America because of the opportunities available here; the only opportunity someone who already has $5 million to blow needs is the opportunity to evade local law enforcement.

Nobody starts on equal footing in America. Yet, the most determined among us — through grit, through toughness, through luck — overcome their disadvantages. That’s the American story.

I don’t want to work for someone who didn’t earn what they have. I also don’t need foreigners to come in and pay down the deficit of the richest country in the world, thank you very much.

Well, nobody asked what I want, and I guess we might soon have a lot more rich people from other countries here in America. Thanks for another great policy proposal MAGA supporters. Enjoy your new overlords.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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