Trump's Gold Card Plan Would Illegally Sell Green Cards While Scrapping Every Other Congressionally Created Pathway to Permanent Residency

Sep 24, 2025

There is nothing more emblematic of the real meaning of Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda than his proposed “Gold Card,” which would openly sell legal permanant residency—the last big step to U.S. citizenship—to rich foreigners for $1 million each. This proposal is, of course, completely illegal.

Forbes provides an overview:

In a recent meeting with immigration hardliners, [Commerce Secretary Howard] Lutnick said the Trump administration was considering “‘suspending’ all other green card categories” so the Trump Gold Card would be the only pathway to immigrate permanently, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday evening. …
Multiple immigration experts told Forbes it is neither legal nor feasible for the Trump Gold Card to replace existing pathways to a U.S. green card—including the EB-5 visa, which offers residency through investment, and the EB-1 and EB-2 visas, which offer residency to foreign nationals through employment.
“Congress writes the rules” on visas and “the president can’t just snap his fingers and change the rules,” Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, told Forbes. …
Loweree scoffed at the administration’s claim that the Gold Card was designed to drive down the federal debt. “The idea that they’re concerned about the debt when they just championed and pushed through the Big Beautiful Bill Act that’s projected to increase the debt by over $3 trillion is ridiculous. This is an effort to create a new pay-to-play scheme and reorient our immigration system into something that simply favors the rich and moves away from the historical priorities of family reunification and focusing on skills and critical labor that’s critical to the U.S. economy.”

In addition to being illegal, the Gold Card reflects the corrupt heart of the Trumpist worldview, in which neither citizenship nor anything else can be earned by ordinary people, and the U.S. government works only for those who are able to pay out large quantities of hard cash.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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