President DonaldTrump's 'Gold Card' visa scheme, pitched as a $5 million route to US residency and eventual citizenship, is stumbling badly in the United States, with government figures showing only 338 requests and 165 paid applications while prominent immigration lawyers warn wealthy clients away.
For context, Trump first trailed the 'Gold Card' in June, telling reporters in the Oval Office that the high‑dollar visa would replace the existing EB‑5 immigrant investor programme and offer 'green card privileges' plus a path to citizenship. He later signed an executive order in September to launch what the administration described as a $5 million initiative, but Congress has not passed any law to create a permanent visa category, leaving the project exposed to reversal by future political decisions.
Trump's original pitch set the Gold Card against the EB‑5 route that has existed since 1990. Under EB‑5, foreigners who invest about $1 million in a company employing at least ten people can obtain US green cards, with an annual cap of 10,000 visas and 3,000 set aside for high‑unemployment areas. US Citizenship and Immigration Services describes that programme as a way to stimulate the economy through job creation and capital investment.
Trump and his team painted EB‑5 very differently. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick branded it 'full of nonsense, make‑believe and fraud' and called it 'a way to get a green card that was low‑price'. In his account, the president decided to end EB‑5 outright and replace it with the far more expensive Gold Card, targeted squarely at 'people with money'. Trump floated the idea that the government could sell up to 10 million of these visas to help reduce the national deficit, and Lutnick promised 'thorough vetting' to ensure only 'wonderful, world‑class global citizens' would qualify.
The pricing has never been entirely tidy. In his Oval Office remarks, Trump spoke of charging about $5 million per application, a level that London School of Economics academic Kristin Surak told Al Jazeera would make it 'the most expensive golden visa option in the world'. Immigration lawyers later described the product to the Washington Post as costing $1 million or $2 million, plus a $15,000 application fee. On top of that, the Department of Homeland Security has stated in a court filing that Gold Card applicants will not supersede EB‑1 or EB‑2 cases, which are reserved for 'extraordinary workers', but there is no detailed public rulebook yet setting out how the new visa fits into the wider system.
Key design questions therefore remain unanswered on the public record, including whether EB‑5 has already been formally shut down, whether both schemes are running in parallel for now, and what exact benefits the Gold Card would provide beyond the 'green card privileges' and citizenship route the president has promised.
Against that background, take‑up has been modest. The Department of Homeland Security told a federal court last week that only 338 people had submitted Gold Card requests and just 165 had gone so far as to pay the $15,000 processing fee. No precise launch‑to‑date window is tied to those figures in the available filings, but they sit a long way below the public ambitions voiced by Lutnick.
The commerce secretary had previously touted projections that the federal government would make more than $100 billion in revenue by issuing 80,000 Gold Cards. He also claimed in March that 1,000 cards, at $5 million each, had already been handed out before the programme officially launched. The Commerce Department did not respond to questions about those assertions, and no other official document has been produced to support the 1,000‑card figure, so it stands for now as an unverified boast rather than a confirmed statistic.
The legal framework is equally unsettled. The visa has been created through an executive order and agency action rather than an Act of Congress that writes a new category into immigration law. That means a future administration could rescind it and lawmakers remain free to restrict or redefine it. At the same time, Congress is the body that originally authorised EB‑5, and Trump has publicly said he intends to end that statutory programme without, so far, presenting replacement legislation.
All of that uncertainty feeds into the cautious advice high‑end immigration counsel are giving to the very people the Gold Card is supposed to attract.
Source: International Business Times UK
