Elon Musk, who chairs the Department of Government Efficiency Commission, acknowledged in a brief social media post that a preliminary version of President Donald Trump’s gold visa card program is currently underway. The visa, priced at $5 million, is being tested before a wider release.
“We’re doing a quiet trial to make sure the system works properly. Once it is fully tested, it will be rolled out to the public with an announcement by the President,” Musk wrote Sunday on X in response to a Wired report.
President Trump originally introduced the concept in February, promoting it as a strategy to bring affluent international investors into the U.S.
As reported by Newsweek, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick shared that the initiative had already drawn 250,000 applicants and seen the sale of 1,000 cards within a single week, resulting in $5 billion in revenue in just one day. He also mentioned that those who secure these visas would not be subject to U.S. taxes on income earned outside the country.
“It’s going to be a route to citizenship,” Trump said, “and wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card. They will be wealthy, they will be successful, they will be spending a lot of money and paying a lot of taxes.”
Lutnick, a key advocate of the plan, suggested to Wired that this new visa could serve as an alternative to the longstanding EB-5 investor visa program.
The EB-5 program, which dates back to a 1990 act of Congress, is the most comparable existing initiative. According to Wired, EB-5 permits about 10,000 foreign nationals annually to qualify for green cards through investments of $1.05 million—or $800,000 in underserved areas—as long as the funds support at least ten full-time jobs.
The EB-5 program was specifically structured to block “corrupt oligarchs to unfairly buy their way into the United States,” as noted in the report.
Doug Rand, who previously served as a senior adviser at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services during the Biden administration, stated, “There’s a whole unit in” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services “filled with economists and national security experts” who review EB-5 applications.
Rand further remarked that the mountain of documentation involved in those applications was so excessive that it physically weighed down the building’s floors at USCIS headquarters.
It appears unlikely that Trump’s gold card program will be subject to such detailed review or oversight.
When Trump was asked in February whether a Russian oligarch would be able to obtain the visa, he reportedly responded from the Oval Office, “yeah, possibly, hey I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people.”
{Matzav.com}