The World’s Most Exclusive Gold Card

President Donald Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick have just announced that the US is scrapping its EB-5 permanent resident visa (also known as a green card) by investment program and replacing it with an upgraded gold card.  The new gold card will offer purchasers (and presumably their immediate families) the right to live and work in the US permanently as well as a path to US citizenship.  Gold cards will be available to fully vetted applicants for US$5,000,000, which is a five-fold increase over a typical EB-5 investment.  

Details are to be announced in the next two weeks, but initial reports suggest that the gold card will require a payment directly to the US Treasury rather than an investment into US real estate or businesses as under the EB-5 program.  Based on current EB-5 applications, Secretary Lutnick believes that the market for the gold card could exceed 250,000 people, which he asserts could eliminate $1.25 trillion (with a “t”) of Federal debt, drive down interest rates and help usher in a new era of American prosperity.    

Membership Has Its Privileges

Gold card holders would qualify as US permanent residents, a status that carries with it US Federal tax on worldwide income, even if the gold card holder does not spend most of her or his time in the US.  Worldwide taxation would remain after the gold card holder obtained US citizenship. Congressman Darin La Hood (R-IL) introduced a bill that would eliminate worldwide tax for US citizens living abroad in December of 2024, but it never reached a vote in the House.  His office has asserted that it will reintroduce the provision this year in the hopes that President Trump will push it through given the President’s campaign pledge to help eliminate “double tax” for Americans abroad.