Trump plans $5 million immigration Gold Cards that companies can buy for talented employees

New York: US President Donald Trump has announced plans for an immigration Gold Card that companies can buy for $5 million for highly talented employees to deal with the uncertainties of work visas and green cards.

The Gold Card programme he announced on Tuesday, though, is primarily meant for the rich who can buy it for themselves.

“Apple and all these companies will be able to buy a card for the people, who are Number 1 in their class at top schools and whom they want to employ,” he said in Washington.

Under the current system of employment visas, he said people may graduate from top institutions like the Wharton School of Finance, his alma mater, or Harvard or Stanford “and nobody knows if you can even go to work for a company”.

The Gold Card “is going to give you green card privileges plus it’s going to be a route to citizenship”, he said. It could deal with the uncertainty of H-1B work visas for professionals that are allocated through a lottery that top talent may miss out on, and the wait of decades for green cards that people from India have to endure.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the Gold Card would replace the current programme known as EB-5 which gives immigration privileges to people who invest between $800,000 and $1.05 million to create jobs depending on the areas they go to.

The Gold Visas will primarily be for “people with money and people that create jobs”, President Trump said.

Lutnick added, “We’re going to make sure they’re wonderful world-class global citizens.”

President Trump said it could become a moneymaker for the US government, helping reduce the deficit. “A million cards would be worth $5 trillion — five trillion and if you sell ten million of the cards, that’s a total of $50 trillion,” he said.

“Well we have $35 trillion in debt, that’d be nice,” President Trump said that the Gold Visa programme could be unveiled in two weeks.

He said the programme was legal and would not require Congressional approval since it would be like allocating green cards.

However, Congress has set national limits for green cards and the Gold Card prgramme may be constrained by them.

Trump may also want to remove some programmes like the green card lottery which allows visas through a lottery to citizens of some countries that have not used their green card quotas.

“Why do we give out lotteries of green cards,” Lutnick asked.

“We shouldn’t give them away,” President Trump said.

The EB-5 programme is set to expire in 2027 when the five-year extension given to it by Congress in 2022 ends.

Lutnick called it a “low-price programme” and said, “It was full of nonsense, make-believe and fraud.”

-IANS