President Donald Trump unveiled a policy he called the "Gold Card," which allows wealthy foreigners to effectively purchase residency in the United States for $5 million. It's a policy intended to replace the existing EB-5 immigrant investor visa program, which allows foreign entrepreneurs to apply for a U.S. work permit if they either invest $800,000 in the U.S. economy or create at least 10 U.S. jobs.
It's also off to a rocky start, The Washington Post reported Monday. Immigration lawyers are strenuously advising prospective wealthy foreigners that the program is illegal and that they shouldn't apply for it.
A number of other countries have so-called "golden visas" which essentially let the wealthy buy their way to the front of the line. That's how the Trump administration, which established the "Gold Card" through tech billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency task force, intends for this to work, as the EB-5 program it's supposed to replace comes with long wait times and limited openings.
However, the report noted, "Any effort to give wealthy people a visa ahead of people who have been waiting in line is bound to lead to legal challenges, attorneys say. Doug Rand, senior adviser to the former director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services under President Joe Biden, said that no administration has changed visa eligibility criteria since the 1990 law that formed today’s green card and temporary visa categories."
“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,” Rand told The Post.
Even right-wing former Trump administration attorneys think this is a dubious prospect. George Fishman, who previously served as deputy general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security and now works for the anti-immigrant extremist group Center for Immigration Studies, said the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled Congress has the constitutional authority to set immigration criteria, not the White House.
“I’m very dubious it can be done without an act of Congress,” he said.
And Ron Klasko, an immigration lawyer in Philadelphia, says he has had to warn several people from Canada and Europe that there's no point applying for Trump's program.
“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?” he said.
All of this comes as the Trump administration, in virtually every other respect, has sought to clamp down on both legal and illegal immigration, from revoking protected status from migrants who have been here for decades, to massive raids of day-laborer gathering areas like Home Depot stores, to the mass expulsion of people to foreign megaprisons with virtually no due process.