Washington President Donald Trump unveiled a new immigration policy on Tuesday where any foreign individual can pay five million dollars, obtain a Gold Card, akin to a Green Card, and become a permanent resident of America. The Gold Card will also create a pathway for citizenship of the United States.
The new Gold Card will replace the EB-5 visa that allowed those foreign individuals who invested a little over a million dollars in general, or $800,000 in targeted employment areas, and created ten jobs to acquire residency in America. The EB-5 visa was created by the US Congress in 1990 to spur foreign investment.
The move is one more step in Trump’s radical overhaul of American citizenship and immigration policies that have affected foreign nationals in general, but also Indians in particular given the deep people to people relationship that exists between the two countries, the high numbers of Indian nationals in the US seeking residency and citizenship, and Indians aspiring to enter the US, both legally and illegally. Tuesday’s move will affect high-net worth individuals, leaving only the ultra-wealthy with the room to invest and acquire US residency.
Speaking to reporters in the White House on Tuesday, Trump said, “We are going to be selling a Gold Card. We are going to be putting a price on that card of about $5 million. It’s going to give you green card privileges plus it’s going to be a route to (American) citizenship, and wealthy people would be coming into our country by buying this card.”
{{/usCountry}}Speaking to reporters in the White House on Tuesday, Trump said, “We are going to be selling a Gold Card. We are going to be putting a price on that card of about $5 million. It’s going to give you green card privileges plus it’s going to be a route to (American) citizenship, and wealthy people would be coming into our country by buying this card.”
{{/usCountry}}Trump added that this will allow people who are “wealthy” and “successful” to come to the US. “They will be spending a lot of money and paying a lot of taxes and employing a lot of people, and we think it’s going to be extremely successful.”
Trump also, somewhat less clearly, appeared to suggest that companies may pay for a Gold Card to get talent, an unlikely possibility given the money involved. “It’s somewhat like a green card, but at a higher level of sophistication. 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, meaning companies will pay for people to get in and to have long, long-term status in the country,”
Trump did not announce any firm investment or employment creation metric as a minimum requirement for the Gold Card unlike the EB-5 visa. Trump indicated that there would be no cap on the number of those who could get a Gold Card and even said that the US could sell 10 million Gold Cards to reduce the deficit. Around 8,000 people obtained the EB-5 visa in the year ending September 30, 2022, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)‘s last available public data.
Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick said that the Gold Card policy will replace EB-5. “The EB-5 program... was full of nonsense, make believe and fraud, and it was a way to get a green card that was low price. So the president said, rather than having this sort of ridiculous EB-5 program, we are going to end the EB-5 program. We are going to replace it with the Trump Gold Card.”
Lutnick said that those who apply for the Gold Card will have to go through “vetting” to ensure they are “wonderful world-class global citizens”. But it wasn’t clear what the basis for the vetting will be. When asked if Russian oligarchs could avail the facility, Trump said, “Yeah, possibly. I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people.”
Trump’s announcement comes in the backdrop of the most radical overhaul of American citizenship and immigration policies in recent decades that has affected Indians in various ways.
On Day 1 of his administration, Trump issued an executive order that revoked birthright citizenship, a constitutional provision that allows any child born in the US to be recognised as an American citizen. While a court has stayed the order on grounds of its unconstitutionality, Trump’s move would have affected hundreds of thousands of Indian immigrants who live in the US in work or student visas and are in the process of having children or intend to have children in the US.
Trump launched a fierce crackdown on illegal immigrants and deployed military flights to return those who had entered the US illegally back to their home countries. Trump’s move has already affected Indians, with the US sending at least two flights to India with illegal immigrants with restraints, creating a political firestorm domestically. The government of India has acknowledged that it will take back those who were verified to be Indians, with the number of illegal immigrants estimated to be anywhere between 220,000 according to the DHS’s 2022 data and 750,000 according to a Pew survey.
Trump’s decisions are also likely to slow down processing times for green card applications as well as H-1B visas, both of which are likely to affect Indians in large numbers. There has also been a major debate within Trump’s ecosystem on the desirability of H-1Bs, with his supporters in the tech and finance community backing the visa that allows American companies to hire foreign talent while his more nativist base objecting to creating pathways for legal migrants at the cost of what they see as opportunities for Americans.
Tuesday’s move to shut down the EB-5 visa route will also affect Indians, though to a much lesser degree. For those who had hoped to invest $800,000 (INR 7 crore approximately) to acquire a US residency, the requirement has suddenly shot up to $5 million (INR 44 crore approximately). This will inevitably shrink the number of individuals who can avail the policy to move to America to a tiny set of the ultra-wealthy business families in India.