President Donald Trump says he wants to replace the EB-5 visa program that sells green cards to wealthy investors with a higher-cost “gold card” program.

“Wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card,” he told reporters on Tuesday. “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 .”

“We’ll be able to sell maybe a million of these cards, maybe more than that,” Trump said.

The EB-5 program is “full of nonsense, make-believe, and fraud,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told the reporters. “It was a way to get a green card that was low priced.”

The bipartisan EB-5 program offers family packages of green cards to investors who merely loan $1 million to companies that create as few as 10 temporary jobs. The green cards can later be traded in for citizenship.

The E-5 program is capped at around 10,000 green cards per year.

The Gold Card would provide green cards — and the chance for citizenship — at a higher price of $5 million, Trump said, without explaining if the card would be per person or per family.

The price of $5 million is a very low price for U.S. citizenship.

Citizenship allows people to move their descendants and their wealth under the protection of the U.S. government — and out of China, India, and other countries where the wealth and children can be grabbed by governments.

Each year, the federal government gives away slices of Americans’ citizenship to roughly  one million legal immigrants, usually at minimal cost. “We give them away — we shouldn’t give them away,” Trump said.

But that inflow of mostly poor migrants imposes huge costs on ordinary Americans, who lose wages, civic stability, and political importance amid the government’s imported diversity.

Trump cannot establish the Gold Card program on his own but needs Congress to pass a law.

After much effort, Congress revamped the EB-5 visa program in 2022 to steer more of the investment money to business projects in poor areas. The EB-5 money is mostly used by the construction and real-estate industry to provide funding to launch multi-year development projects.