Trump Teases Fast-Track Immigration for Rich People: ‘We’re Gonna Be Selling a Gold Card’ for $5 Million
President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday the creation of a “gold card” immigration program he said would allow foreign nationals to come into the country for a price of $5 million.
The program would replace the EB-5 visa program, which offers permanent residency to international investors. Trump complained Tuesday from the Oval Office that the current program did not charge enough and distributed too many visas free of charge.
“We’re going to be doing something else that’s going to be very, very good,” Trump told reporters. “We’re going to be selling a gold card. You have a green card. This is a gold card. 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.”
Trump said his new program will offer a “route to citizenship” for people whose wealth the U.S. can tax.
“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,” he said. “And we think it’s going to be extremely successful.” Trump later said:
The gold card will bring in with it people that create jobs, very high-level people. I think companies will pay to get people in. For instance, you today graduate from the Wharton School of Finance or Harvard or Stanford or any college, and nobody knows if you can even go to work for a company. So Apple and all these, you know, companies that want to get people to be working for them will be able to buy a card. And for the people that are number one in their class at top schools.
You know, I see that as one of the things, but generally speaking, it’ll be people with money and people. They create jobs and they won’t have to pay any tax on income outside of the United States, which they’re not paying right now. They’re not citizens, but they’ll have to pay. If they create jobs in the United States. They’ll pay full taxes like everybody else. So 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 his administration hopes to sell at least one million gold cards, which he said would be applied to deficits and the national debt.
“If you sell 10 million of the cards, that’s a total of $50 trillion,” he added. “Well, we have 35 trillion in debt. That’d be nice. So we’ll see.”
Trump concluded of the EB-5 program visas, “We give them away. Why should we give them away? We shouldn’t give away.”
Watch above via the Trump administration.
