February 26, 2025 - 8:00pm
As part of his shake-up of the US immigration system, Donald Trump has this week proposed to replace its existing investor citizenship programme, known as EB-5, with a new “gold card” scheme. The gold card allows wealthy investors to obtain a path to citizenship in exchange for a hefty $5 million injection into the domestic economy. This raises the contribution threshold significantly as the previous visa only had a $1,050,000 investment minimum, or $800,000 directed to distressed areas.
While standing next to the President, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick promised that candidates for the new gold card will “have to go through vetting […] to make sure they’re wonderful world-class global citizens”. Yet when a reporter asked if Russian oligarchs will simply buy their way to citizenship under the plan, Trump deigned to offer any reassurances, saying: “Yeah, possibly […] I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people.”
The exchange highlights the possibility, implicit in many such schemes, of malicious foreign entities using the avenue to buy and exert political or economic influence within the host country — under the benign guise of creating American jobs and opportunities. Indeed, the largest demand for investor citizenship programmes globally comes from none other than “China, the Middle East and Russia”, precisely the places known for running aggressive foreign interference operations and with whom Americans ought to be wary about fostering closer integration.
Other Western countries that have offered their own gold card, such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and Ireland, have recently had to shut down these immigration streams after running into problems with adverse side effects of foreign capital infusion, such as heightened risk of money laundering and severe distortions in property markets. In the case of the US, Lutnick himself admitted that the EB-5 programme “was full of nonsense, make-believe and fraud”, asserting that the problem was “the low price”. However, it is not clear that increasing that price to $5 million would fundamentally alter the dynamic, given that the amount is practically chump change for obscenely rich global oligarchs and their foreign government patrons.
For instance, the “wealthy Chinese” often denounced by Trump-aligned border hawks in their efforts against birthright citizenship can simply go through the simpler route of buying a gold card, either for themselves or their proxies. After all, their influence had been such that, during Trump’s first term, the White House openly entertained expanding visas for Chinese investors in March 2020, as the “Wuhan virus” surged. In other words, his record does not inspire confidence.
But the larger question for the administration this time around is what such a policy says about its basic conception of citizenship. As his other immigration reform priorities signal a dramatic tightening of the limits of the American political community, does this anti-globalist president really want to return to the cheap subordination of national civic belonging to the whims and imperatives of borderless, globalised capital? It is bad enough that Trump 2.0 has been so visibly influenced by homegrown oligarchs; does it need to cater to foreign ones, too?
1TrueCuencoism
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SubscribeThere he goes again. I suppose having 10+million stragglers at the bottom of the food chain enter illegally is better than a few filthy rich ones entering legally?
Agree. And it’s not like the scheme isn’t in place already. Trump’s just 5xed the amount to add some extra bucks to the treasury.
Is this serious analysis? Can’t all of this be happening now? The issue with china influencing some riding nominations – all for the Liberal Party – could have easily been thwarted if the govt didn’t turn a blind eye.
People who can drop €5,000,000 as chump change are not typically the people likely to commit violent crimes and start open gangland war in your country. That said, it has had an inflationary effect on the property market here in Ireland where the threshold was set much lower at €2,000,000 and the vast majority of people who signed up to it were Chinese.
If a market is open, people can often just invest in real estate using funds. But indeed, it’s inflationary and also useless investment. Expensive real estate does not produce anything. On the contrary, rent seeking sucks the productivity out of the real economy.
Useless investment unless you are Real Estate magnate.
Don’t think much more that’s behind this needs spelling out does it.
Indeed. They have people to commit the violent crimes for them…
Yep just another example how Trump all about the v rich. No doubt some side hustle opportunities, much like his own Crypto.
The intriguing thing is whether the reality that he’s all about himself, his fawning Billionaire Courtiers and foreign Autocrat chums becomes clearer to his supporters slowly but inextricably, or via a sudden avalanche. The former is clearly happening already. The possibility it turns into an avalanche, despite the depth of the sunk-cost in this fraudster, has increased in recent weeks.
A DNC intern taking a pizza break in the basement dreams on.
May be not related, but when I looked at the titles, my head just think that “well, I’ll let the Vietnamese billionaires pay such money to get a gold card to renovate the Vietnamese business districts in the US”.
I know many people here are “anti-communist” and so they are against the Vietnamese communist government and being supportive of Vietnamese “Republicans”. However I have to admit that these Little Saigon-branded places in the US looks more like fiefdoms where a mix of small number of neocons-cum-neolibs-minded Vietnamese-speaking people not just dominated, but monopolized the socio-political-economical-cultural parts, every fabrics of life in these places. Opponents of this dominance could simply be painted as “communist sympathizers”.
I understand that these Overseas communities have a distinct cultural identity that is different to Vietnamese in Vietnam, but what I despise them is their eagerness to despise anything – culturally and economically – different from them. This could be a reason why these towns never actually develops, while younger people are becoming more afraid of political views of older, “Republicans” Vietnamese, so when California experienced a population drain during 2020 – 23, I read an article that states that some of the cities that have traditionally where the Vietnamese-American community lives (i.e. Anaheim, Westminster) are those that hit harder by that.
To be fair, if these “foreign regimes” (in this case, I cite Vietnamese) ever tried to invest in the region, then that would be a fresh wind change to the life and culture of the region, which has become increasingly boring for some reason. I have never gone to the US before, but I know some things because I used to watched videos from Overseas Vietnamese TV channels, and I have to admit that their content is somehow exhausted, being more dependent on informercial and teleshopping content and their production quality is more typical to an African country than in the US. The younger Vietnamese Americans are just surfing TikTok, listening and dancing to either K-Pop or music from Vie Channel instead. Even I heard that the Vietnamese state’s television service (VTV) is planning for an international service targeting North America (!)
So enough for this unrelated rant. But I’m just hope for a brighter days ahead with that scheme…
Seems a bit like a PR stunt. There are approximately 2 million people outside of the US who have a net worth of 5 million or more in the first place. Most of these people are probably already exposed to the US market and they probably have no desire to become a US citizen so they can be taxed more.
This is practically the same as Britain’s former non-dom policy. Hope there’s lots of take up as they need to pay off their debt.
Trump.knows some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people. That’s OK then.
Surely, there would be restrictions written into the Gold Cards preventing purchasers from activities antithetical to the country. They can be as tight as the US wants and if foreigners don’t like them tough titty.