In an article for the Fast Company published Friday, lawyer and writer Jay Willis strongly criticized President Donald Trump's "gold card" program, which would allow wealthy foreigners to purchase lawful permanent residency of the United States.
While announcing this scheme in February, Trump said, “Wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card, they’ll be wealthy and they’ll be successful, and they’ll be spending a lot of money and paying a lot of taxes and employing a lot of people."
He told reporters that gold card buyers would not be required to pay tax on their income outside the U.S.; that the program was “totally legal” and “all worked out from the legal standpoint” — and that he expected it to go live within two weeks.
“Two weeks,” confirmed Department of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, standing behind Trump in the Oval Office.
But the Fast Company piece, titled "Trump's 'gold card' visa scheme is pure gilded nonsense," notes that when Trump estimated that the government could raise an easy $5 trillion by selling “maybe a million” gold cards, Lutnick couldn't help but laugh with pleasure. “Wow!” he said.
Willis noted in the article Friday that the amount of the required capital investment is set by statute, and "nothing in the law would allow Trump to increase it to $5 million just because he feels like it."
"His distinction between programs that confer citizenship and programs that only confer lawful permanent resident status is nonsensical, as is Lutnick’s reference to a 'license' from the Department of Commerce," Willis wrote.
He continued: "Depending on what he has in mind, Trump’s promise that gold card holders will enjoy some form of VIP treatment—'green card privileges plus,' he called it—probably also hinges on Congress’s willingness and ability to pass a law to that effect."
According to Willis, the White House’s failure to get the initiative off the ground illustrates how unprepared Trump is for the basic tasks of governance, even in the rare instances when he shows interest in them.He argued that Trump has long pitched himself to voters as a political outsider with the unique "Business Guy Mindset" needed to turn the federal government from a bloated bureaucracy into a streamlined, profitable enterprise.
However, Willis contended that Trump consistently underestimates how difficult it is to deliver on his grand promises. As evidence, he pointed to the fact that the idea Trump once claimed could single-handedly eliminate the country’s $36 trillion national debt still exists, four months later, only as a rudimentary website — one that, in Willis’s view, resembles a marketing page for a new over-the-counter erectile dysfunction medication.