Topline
The Trump Gold Card Visa officially launched Friday for 80% less than its original $5 million price tag—a telltale sign, say immigration investment experts, of low demand.
On Friday, President Trump signed an executive order launching the Trump Gold Card immigration visa, which he announced on social media as being “available for $1 Million Dollars for individuals”—instead of the previously touted $5 million price—and promising “U.S. residency in record time.”
“This is an admission of failure if they cut the price by 80%,” Nuri Katz, founder of Apex Capital Partners, who has for three decades provided investment immigration guidance to ultra-high-net-worth clients, told Forbes in a text over the weekend.
The revamped TrumpCard.gov website also invites applicants to join a waiting list for a new $5 million Trump Platinum Card, which would grant “the ability to spend up to 270 days in the United States without being subject to U.S. taxes on non-U.S. income.”
A third product, the $2 million Trump Corporate Gold Card, promises “U.S. residency in record time” for select employees and allows businesses to “transfer access from one employee and grant it to another.”
The United States already has an immigrant investment program called the EB-5 visa, which offers a path to permanent residency through an investment of between $800,000 and $1 million in an infrastructure project or U.S. commercial enterprise, and a promise to “create or preserve 10 permanent full-time jobs for qualified U.S. workers.”
Before Trump Gold Card visas can be implemented, Congress would need to create new immigration and tax laws, multiple immigration experts told Forbes.
Since February, President Donald Trump and U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick promoted the $5 million visa program as a way to whittle down the $36 trillion national debt by granting visas—and permanent residency—to wealthy immigrants who invested in the United States. Trump suggested the U.S. could “sell maybe a million of these cards” at the $5 million price point and Lutnick said he believed 200,000 foreign individuals would invest.
“I have rarely seen anybody spend more than 10% of their net worth on an immigration program, and generally it's more like 5%,” Katz told Forbes in May. Using that metric, an individual would need to be worth $100 million to afford a $5 million investment. The challenge is there are fewer than 30,000 centimillionaires in the entire world, according to a report from Henley & Partners, and over one third of them are American. That left a potential market of roughly 20,000 foreign centimillionaires—roughly one tenth of what Lutnick said was feasible. Forbes has reached out to the Department of Commerce for comment. “And they still have to go through Congress,” Katz said.
The Gold Card visa program is run by the U.S. Commerce Department, instead of the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) within the Department of Homeland Security, which traditionally manages immigration investment initiatives. “Certainly the executive branch doesn't have the authority to create a new visa without Congress' authority,” Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, told Forbes in June. It remains to be seen when and how the Trump Gold Card would replace the existing EB-5 program, run through USCIS, which raised about $4 billion for the U.S. economy last year and has been reauthorized through September 2027 with protective grandfathering provisions for petitions filed before September 2026.
Trump Gold Card Website Is ‘A Joke’ That Raises Red Flags, Expert Says (Forbes)