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As of now, the $5 million Trump Gold Card visa—which would give wealthy investors U.S. residency and an expedited path to citizenship—is still just a concept of a marketing plan without nearly enough potential buyers, experts told Forbes, despite a ballyhooed announcement by Trump in February and repeated promises of an imminent launch.

Trump and Lutnick have promoted the $5 million visa program as a way to whittle down the $36 trillion national debt. Speaking at an Axios event in Washington, D.C., last week, Lutnick said the $5 million Gold Card visa would offer benefits beyond green card status, including a path to U.S. citizenship and possible tax benefits, such as exemption from U.S. taxes on foreign income. Many countries offer investment immigration programs allowing foreign nationals to gain legal residency or citizenship by making a substantial investment in its economy. In the United States, for example, the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program grants lawful permanent residency to foreign nationals who invest between $800,000 and $1 million in the U.S. economy and agree to “create or preserve 10 permanent full-time jobs for qualified U.S. workers.” Trump’s Gold Card visa would replace the EB-5 program, which raised about $4 billion for the U.S. economy last year. “We are already seeing increased momentum in EB-5 demand, as investors look to secure a U.S. green card at the current USD $800,000 price point before the potential introduction of a much higher-tier option,” Henley & Partners, a London-based wealth and migration advisory firm, said in a statement to Forbes. “The EB-5 program, reauthorized through to September 2027 with protective grandfathering provisions for petitions filed before September 2026, continues to be robust, and we expect demand to remain strong in the near term. While it remains to be seen if, when, and how the Gold Card may replace EB-5, it is likely that any transition would be phased over time.”

Trump has suggested the U.S. could "sell maybe a million of these cards, maybe more than that." He said selling 1 million Gold Cards would raise $5 trillion, while 10 million cards could bring in $50 trillion, an amount that would be enough to eliminate the national debt and then some. Last week, Lutnick appeared to scale back that ambition, floating figures as high as $1 trillion if 200,000 individuals invested.

“The math does not add up,” Katz said. “In my 34 years of experience, I have rarely seen anybody spend more than 10% of their net worth on an immigration program, and generally it's more like 5%. So you've got to be worth $100 million in order to be able to afford this.” The inconvenient truth for the Trump administration is there are fewer than 30,000 centimillionaires in the entire world, according to a report from Henley & Partners. Moreover, more than one third of the world’s centimillionaires are American. That leaves a potential market of roughly 20,000 foreign centimillionaires—roughly one tenth of what Lutnick said would be needed for the government to bring in $1 trillion. “The pool of global UHNWIs (ultra-high-net-worth individuals) able—and willing—to contribute USD $5 million outright is relatively small, especially when compared to residence by investment alternatives that are investment-based rather than donation-based,” Henley & Partners said in an email to Forbes. “It could potentially be an attractive program done correctly,” Katz said, “but it won't be a million people, and it won't be 200,000. Maybe reality is hitting them now, about whether or not there really is interest for this.”

“It looks to me like they’re backpedaling,” Katz said. “Now they have to make a decision of whether or not there really is the interest, because they are going to have to expand a lot of political capital in order to get this done.” Katz said ultra-wealthy investors will be skeptical before more details are known. “Doing a lot of fancy marketing and talking about it on TV is nice, but I believe the market understands that from the talk to reality to what the details of the law will actually be—the devil is in the details,” he said, adding he would caution clients not to register on the website until legislation is in place and more is known about how the collected information will be handled and protected. “There is no upside to registering right now,” he said. “We don't know where that information is going to go and who's going to use it. Will it be used only by the U.S. government? Could it maybe be sold to private businesses? It’s going to be a pretty powerful database of rich people.”

Creating a website to gauge interest is one thing, says Katz, but getting to the point of actually processing applications is another. Last month, when Mr. Trump showed reporters aboard Air Force One a laminated card emblazoned with his face, the Statue of Liberty and a bald eagle, he said the visa would be out in “less than two weeks.” For months, Lutnick has repeated the “two week” promise. But, realistically, such an initiative could take many months or even years, given how slowly the gears of Congress turn. “What they have been talking about would require a change in numerous immigration laws and in the tax code. Trump’s control of Congress may end a year and a half from now,” Katz pointed out. “I think [the administration] really got ahead of themselves without having done the homework in advance. But now they understand there's going to be a lot of hard, heavy lifting in order to both create the legislation and then create the administrative structures to process these applications.” Responding to an inquiry on whether Trump could launch an immigration visa without legislation from Congress, the American International Lawyers Association pointed to a blog post from March written by four experts in EB-5 investor visas. “As a matter of law, it is important to remember that the President cannot unilaterally end or change the EB-5 program,” the authors wrote, noting the program has been reauthorized through September 2027. “Unless Congress repeals it, or passes a new or amended law,” the authors expect the existing program to remain in place.

1,000. That’s how many Gold Cards Lutnick told the All-In podcast he sold “in one day,” claiming he raised $5 billion for the U.S. Treasury. Katz is skeptical. “All I could do was laugh, because I understand all the intricacies around that, and that was just a joke,” he said. “It’s ridiculous. I mean, how would they apply to the Secretary of Commerce? You can't apply to him. There's no mechanism to fill out an application—forget the fact that there's no law.”

In February, Lutnick told Fox News’ Bret Baier the idea came from Trump’s friend, billionaire hedge fund manager John Paulson, “who came up and said, 'Hey, why aren't we doing better with that?'" Since then, Lutnick repeated the Paulson origin story on the All-In podcast in March, saying “John Paulson had a call with Donald Trump…and was kicking around the idea of we should sell—why do we give away visas, we should sell them,” despite that foreign nationals now pay up to $1 million for a EB-5 visa. “Then my job,” Lutnick told the podcasters, “is to figure out how to do it.”

Elon Musk Says Government Is Doing A ‘Quiet Trial’ Of Trump Gold Card Visa (Forbes)