A program promoted by President Donald Trump selling exclusive visas to give “very high-level people” a path to American citizenship is being brought to life. According to reports, engineers with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are working on the special immigration cards, nicknamed “gold cards.” The price of these visas is estimated at $5 million.
The engineers are working in concert with the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to create an application process and a website for those interested. Trump and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick voiced the idea in February, and Lutnick expounded on it during a podcast appearance last month. “So if you have a gold card — which used to be a green card — you’re a permanent resident of America,” he said, not explicitly saying that they would be full citizens. “They pay $5 million, and they have the right to be an American and the right to be in America as long as they’re good people and they’re vetted and they can’t break the law.” Lutnick claimed that he sold “1,000” of the visas, but a source close to the project said they’re not ready for monetary transactions yet.
According to CNBC, there’s another enticing element to the gold visa – a carve out that means that those who obtain one wouldn’t be required to pay taxes on their overseas income. Notably, the new program would make the U.S. among the most expensive in the world, with Singapore and New Zealand as the top two.
Trump and Lutnick said that this program would replace the current EB-5 visa granting green cards to foreign nationals investing $800,000 to a little over a million dollars in American business. That program brought in an estimated $4 billion for the economy last year. The project is being led by Marko Elez and Edward Coristine, two members of Musk’s DOGE team. Both have been embroiled in heavy controversy over their backgrounds. Corisitine, who is publicly referred to as “Big Balls,” had been fired from an Arizona tech company after “an internal investigation into the leaking of proprietary company information that coincided with his tenure.” Elez was fired after he was linked to an anonymous account on X, formerly Twitter, that posted heavily racist remarks and promoted immigration based on eugenics. He was rehired at the behest of Vice President JD Vance and Trump.