Immigration lawyers have warned clients that the Trump administration’s efforts to create a bizarre $5 million “Gold Card” visa for wealthy foreigners may well be illegal and would face significant hurdles if forced into law.
“There’s no lawful basis to do this, and if they do it anyway, they’re going to get sued, and they’re almost certainly going to lose,” Doug Rand, a former Citizenship and Immigration Services adviser under President Joe Biden, told the Washington Post Monday.
Resident-by-investment programs, otherwise known as “Golden Visas,” aren’t uncommon among other nations around the world, typically granting the right to live and work in exchange for a significant injection of capital into a country’s real estate or business sectors, or the purchase of government bonds.
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They’re also a source of significant controversy. Critics argue these schemes often have harmful consequences for domestic populations—offering preferential treatment to wealthy foreigners and displacing local communities by driving up the price of housing—while a general lack of transparency and oversight has also made them prime targets for corrupt officials and organized criminals looking to launder dirty money and evade tax in their home countries.
Trump has nevertheless, consistently touted his enthusiasm for implementing one of these programs in the United States—flashing about a laminated sample “Gold Card” during a press briefing aboard Air Force One earlier in April when he also told journalists the real deal would be available “in about less than two weeks.”
The Post reports that around the same time, representatives from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency cost-cutting initiative, then still headed up by Elon Musk, tasked staff at the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department with setting up a system to share data to different areas of DHS.
The system was reportedly up and running in under a week. As of late June, however, “not a single application had come along on a webpage for the visa application, which isn’t public,” the Post reported, citing an unnamed source.
Trump’s plans have nevertheless already prompted a backlash, given how starkly an envisioned priority lane for the uber-rich stands in contrast to his administration’s relentlessly aggressive deportation of lower-income immigrants, but attorneys like Rand argue the proposals may very well be little more than a pipe dream anyway.
That’s partly because immigration experts say Trump can’t change immigration rules without express Congressional approval. “This administration keeps forgetting that the executive branch doesn’t make the law,” as lawyer Rosanna Berardi, based in Buffalo, put it to the Post.
No administration has seen fit to amend visa regulations in nearly four decades, with Congress having pushed back against several presidential efforts to change the categories. Notably, GOP Representatives argued fiercely against perceived executive overreach when President Barack Obama tried to legalize the status of children who’d been brought into the U.S., and Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, told the newspaper there is in any case “zero appetite for people in Congress to consider this right now.”
As a result, attorneys like Ron Klasko, based in Philadelphia, are urging wealthy clients who’ve otherwise expressed interest in Trump’s scheme to steer clear of them for the time being. “Why would I want to do that before I know if it’s a law, what the law says, what the requirements are, what information the form is going to ask me for, what documents I have to produce, what the terms and conditions are,” Klasko told the Post.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House and the Department of Homeland Security for comment.
A Department of Commerce spokesperson told the Post that Secretary Howard Lutnick remains “determined to follow through on President Trump’s vision to create a Gold Card visa program that will raise unprecedented revenue for the United States.”
