Until now, the Trump Gold Card Visa of 5 million dollars – which would give rich investors the residence in the United States and an accelerated path to citizens – remains only a concept of a marketing plan without sufficient potential buyers, experts told Forbes, despite the publicized Trump announcement in February and the repeated promises of an imminent launch.
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“The challenges are overwhelming to be able to achieve this,” Nuri Katz, founder of Apex Capital Partners, who has 34 years of career by providing advice on immigration of investments to clients of Net Ultra High Heritage.
The Congress would have to create new immigration and tax laws to regulate Trump’s golden card, Katz said, adding: “At this time there is no real program or program details, and there is no law; there is only much marketing and heating of the market, so you cannot even advise anyone about it, because the law does not exist.”
The American immigration lawyers association also told Forbes that the launch of Trump’s golden card would require the Congress to change the existing immigration laws.
Eight days ago, the Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, said that a website, Trumpcard.gov, would be launched “within a week”, but from Thursday morning, the URL shows a cloudfare starting page of Cloudfare Zero Trust that invites users to “receive a login code by email”, although several attempts of Forbes for register did not work.
Elon Musk said earlier this month that the Government is “making a silent evidence” of the visa before its implementation, without providing details.
The Trade Department did not respond to the Forbes consultation on when the website would be launched.
What is Trump’s Golden Visa card?
Trump and Lutnick have promoted the 5 million dollars visa program as a way to reduce the national debt of 36 billion dollars. In an axios event in Washington, DC, last week, Lutnick said the 5 million dollars Visa would offer benefits beyond permanent residence, including a way to obtain US citizenship and possible tax benefits, such as the exemption of US taxes on foreign income. Many countries offer investment immigration programs that allow foreigners to obtain legal residence or citizens through a substantial investment in their economy. In the United States, for example, the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program grants legal permanent residence to foreigners who invest between 800,000 and 1 million dollars in the US economy and commit to “create or preserve 10 permanent jobs in full time for qualified American workers”. The Trump Gold Card Visa would replace the EB-5 program, which raised about 4,000 million dollars for the US economy last year. “We are already observing a greater impulse in the EB-5 demand, since investors seek to obtain an American green card at the current price of USD 800,000 before the possible introduction of a higher category option,” said Henley & Partners, a firm of patrimonial and migratory advice based in London, in a statement to Forbes. “The EB-5 program, re-authorized until September 2027 with protection clauses for the applications submitted before September 2026, remains solid, and we foresee that the demand will be kept high in the short term. While it is still to be seen if, when and how the golden card will replace the EB-5, it is likely that the transition will be made gradually.”
How many income does Trump say that the Golden Visa card will contribute?
Trump has suggested that the United States could “sell perhaps one million of these cards, or even more.” He said that the sale of one million gold cards would raise $ 5 billion, while 10 million cards could generate 50 billion, a sufficient amount to eliminate national debt and something else. Last week, Lutnick seemed to moderate that ambition, proposing figures of up to 1 billion dollars if 200,000 people invested.
Against: why the numbers of the Visa Gold card do not fit
“The accounts do not fit,” Katz said. “In my 34 years of experience, I have rarely seen someone to spend more than 10% of their net assets on an immigration program, and it is generally 5%. So you have to have a heritage of 100 million dollars to be able to afford it.” The uncomfortable truth for the Trump administration is that there are less than 30,000 centimillonarios worldwide, according to a Henley & Partners report. In addition, more than a third of the world’s centimillionaires are American. That leaves a potential market of approximately 20,000 foreign centimillionaires, approximately one tenth of what Lutnick said it would be needed for the government to raise a billion dollars. “The overall group of people with an ultraralt net worth (UHNWI) capable of contributing 5 million dollars is directly small, especially compared to investment alternatives based on investment instead of donations,” said Henley & Partners in an email to Forbes. “It could be an attractive program if it is implemented correctly,” Katz added, “but they will not be a million people or 200,000. Maybe they are now realizing whether there really is interest in this.”
Will the Trump golden card website be officially launched?
“It seems to me that they are going back,” Katz said. “Now they have to decide if there is really interest, because they will have to invest a lot of political capital to achieve it.” Katz added that ultra -raw investors will be skeptical before more details are known. “To do a lot of sophisticated marketing and talk about it on television is fine, but I think the market understands that, what is said to the reality and details of the law, the key is in the details,” he said, adding that he would warn customers not to register on the website until the legislation is in force and know more about how the information will be managed and protect. “Registering now has no advantage,” he said. “We don’t know where that information or who will use it will go. Is it used only by the US government? Could private companies be sold? It will be a fairly powerful database of rich people.”
Being realistic, how soon a golden Trump card could be launched?
Creating a website to measure interest is one thing, says Katz, but getting to the point of processing applications is another. Last month, when Mr. Trump showed journalists aboard Air Force One a laminated card with his face, the statue of freedom and a Calva eagle, he said that the visa would be available in “less than two weeks.” For months, Lutnick has repeated the promise of “two weeks.” But, being realistic, such an initiative could take many months or even years, given the slowness with which Congress works. “What they have been discussing a change in numerous immigration laws and in the Trump Code. Trump’s control could end within a year and a half,” Katz said. “I think (the Administration) was advanced without having done the task in advance. But now they understand that there will be a lot of hard and hard work both to create the legislation and to create administrative structures to process these requests.” In response to a question about whether Trump could implement an immigration visa without a Congress Law, the American International Lawyers Association mentioned a March blog post written by four experts in EB-5 investor visas. “As a matter of law, it is important to remember that the president cannot cancel or unilaterally modify the EB-5 program,” wrote the authors, pointing out that the program has been re-authorized until September 2027. “Unless congress repeals or approves a new or amended law,” the authors expect the current program to remain in force.
Large number
1000. That is the amount of gold cards that Lutnick told in the all-in podcast that sold “in one day”, claiming to have raised 5000 million dollars for the United States Treasury. Katz is skeptical. “I could only laugh, because I understand all the complexities of that, and it was just a joke,” he said. “It is ridiculous. That is, how would the Secretary of Commerce be requested? You cannot request him. There is no mechanism to fill a request; let’s forget that there is no law.”
Who was the idea of Trump’s golden card?
In February, Lutnick told Bret Baier, from Fox News, that the idea arose from Trump’s friend, the billionaire manager of coverage funds John Paulson, “who approached and said: ‘Hey, why don’t you do better with that?'” Since then, Lutnick repeated the story of Paulson’s origin in the Podcast All-in in March, saying: “John Paulson had a call with Donald Trump … and I was considering the idea that we should sell … Why did we give visas? We should sell them”, despite the fact that foreigners now pay up to one million dollars for an EB-5 visa. “Then my job,” Lutnick told Podcasters, “is to find out how to do it.”
This article was originally published by Forbes Us.
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