“Sec. 2. The Gold Card. (a) The Secretary of Commerce, in coordination with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Homeland Security, shall establish a “Gold Card” program authorizing an alien who makes an unrestricted gift to the Department of Commerce under 15 U.S.C. 1522 (or for whom a corporation or similar entity makes such a gift) to establish eligibility for an immigrant visa using an expedited process, to the extent consistent with law and public safety and national security concerns. The requisite gift amount shall be $1 million for an individual donating on his or her own behalf and $2 million for a corporation or similar entity donating on behalf of an individual”
Calling it a “gift” somehow manages to add an extra level of ick in my mind.
When to elect a 1980s New York real estate developer into high office, don't be surprised when he views the entire world through a transactional lens (generally zero sum).
Whenever there's a transaction, that means that both parties give a different value to whatever is exchanged. For example, when you buy a home, the buyer prefers the house to the money and the seller prefers the money to the house. If this wasn't the case, the transaction just wouldn't take place.
So transactions are the opposite of a zero-sum game, they are a win-win game, where both parties end up winning. Because value is subjective.
Does not sound that differend from the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Visa the US already has except for the fact that you gift the money to the feds instead of investing it in a company with 10 employees.
EB-5 requires a million dollar investment that creates 10 jobs for 2 years. There's also documentation of the source of the funds.
1 million dollars seems exceptionally cheap for a US resident visa with no strings attached.
In Canada some provinces have a similar process where you can run a business for a year and apply for permanent residency. In my city there were a bunch of weird little, clearly unprofitable franchises - bubble tea was one for a long time - where the owner was basically running it at a loss to buy citizenship.
It seemed to require a little more commitment to the community and effort than just handing over a big bag of cash. They've discontinued it in Ontario now, which has probably contributed to the glut of unoccupied commercial real estate.
Honestly the “Gold Card” doesn’t worry me too much - the US has had investor visas for a long time.
The related “Platinum Card” on the other hand makes me absolutely livid. It means that for $5 million, there’s a status available that is arguably better than US citizenship, granting 270 days of presence in the U.S., and exemption from US taxation. I am a U.S. citizen who spends <30 days per year in the U.S., and I can’t even open an ISA in the UK where I live due to the US’s global tax rules, let alone anything more complex. To have citizenship based taxation and then grant a special status to foreign wealthy individuals is a slap in the face of decency.
270 days in the U.S. is also long enough to become tax non-resident in whatever country you’re spending the other 90 days in, making it likely that you’d be tax resident nowhere.
> My Administration has worked relentlessly to undo the disastrous immigration policies of the prior administration.
Genuinely ignorant here, but historically speaking, is it normal for the president to bad-mouth the previous administration so openly and often? Especially in writing like this.
Typically the president has a level of decorum. Snark is for proxies, not the leader / that’s typically a best practice for any executive, as it goes the principal the ability to walk stuff back later. That’s more of a norm than a rule.
The characters in the whack pack seem the use Andrew Jackson as a model. He was similarly tasteful and also a disaster.
No it is not and it is another lie Trump is using to destroy democracy. Typically a Potus whether he won by disagreeing (in reality or fiction) with the previous Potus, the newly elected would just move on and implement their agenda. Trump is doing this so to brand anything he does as a brilliant strategy and solution to whatever the past was. By creating blame on the system, anything you therefor come up with must be a tangible idea. All you need is for people to “give it a chance”. In reality everyone “giving it a chance” has no knowledge of how the current system works.
There is no advantage to doing this unless you are a vindictive, angry, petty PoS.
The important thing to keep in mind is that it is all fiction and it is ONLY Trump saying these things. It is important to let authoritarian ideas die on the vine rather than endlessly debate the strawmen and keep them alive, IMO.
I really do not believe this was the case before 45. One of the generally-agreed-upon criteria for presidential candidates was that they act "Presidential", which was understood to be a sort of universally unoffensive masculine stereotype? E.g. Before 2016 it would be unthinkable for the President of the United States to openly curse beyond a "TV-PG" way.
As I recall, other Presidents might decry Congress etc. but would almost never out-and-out criticize the direct previous official actions taken by the office of the Presidency.
“We inherited a financial crisis unlike any that we’ve seen in our time,”
That's a fact of reality. Trying to compare what Trump is doing to simply stating that we were in a financial crisis when Obama took over is while every single argument with someone from the right should be done knowing they don't stand on principles and will literally redefine words and reality to try and make a point.
No, it's unprecedented. You can generally look at previous versions of the whitehouse website using the national archives, eg this one from the Bush 43 era:
Also unprecedented is the use of Executive Orders to govern, as opposed to legislating through Congress, but that is not an entirely Trumpist thing, as Congress has been (take your pick) failing to govern/applying checks and balances for 20+ years now and across multiple administrations.
EB-5 is intended to create businesses and jobs in the US as part of the process. This is just straight-up "give us money and we'll give you residency".
On the other hand, it's not out of line with programs in other countries (ex. NZ's golden visa program)
Most of those "investments" for EB-5 visas are really just shares in "businesses" that hold piles of money for the "investors." The payment straight to the treasury is both more honest and more revenue for the government.
Jobs are created by economic demand, which rich people generate a lot of. So we get this either way.
NZ’s Active Investor Plus program is more like EB-5 than this. AIP requires that migrants invest their funds, not donate them.
The Growth category requires fewer residency days and a NZ$5m (~US$3m) investment in “growth” companies or funds, including VC funds and companies that VC funds invest with.
The Balanced category requires double the investment and has a wider range of asset classes, but also a longer duration and higher number of days of residency required.
Someone whose political instinct is to oppose anything trump does because they hate trump has been much more consistently correct, and a better predictor of the outcomes, than someone who has been trying to analyze each of his actions giving him the benefit of the doubt as a sincere actor each time.
The double whammy of conflation with bribing immigration officers and being done by Trump will be hard to get past, but evaluating the policy on it's own it seems like a net positive. Everyone who uses this must really want to be here and a million bucks to spend on food stamps or medicaid is a pure win.
I know literally dozens of people who would come even for an entry level job. I occasionally work as a volunteer assisting foreigners who want to work in the US tech industry.
Also, anecdotally, a friend just immigrated from Scandinavia to the US 3 months ago. He's loving it and has no plans to go back despite the political situation.
Most people are fairly isolated from the day-to-day political show. Life keeps going more or less the same across different presidents.
Quite the opposite. More people opted not to vote than voted for any specific candidate.
I think that if the candidates can’t get a majority of the population to vote for them (not just a majority of the voters), the office should remain vacant.
The fact that we did, the fact that we have consistently been right about everything, and that we still lost, will all continue to provide grand amusement and deep satisfaction to the victors as they proceed to crush us. What could be sweeter than such a perfect exercise of Power?
$1 million just seems cheap for permanent residence. If there were other requirements like bringing a certain amount of assets into the country with you to generate tax revenue on the income stream then I would also be ok with it.
Is this a joke? Something like 0.5-1% of households in Europe have >$1M in investable/liquid assets. In the rest of the world, that fraction is much lower. A $1M gift -- that doesn't appear to guarantee results, only an expedited process -- strongly selects for oligarchs and criminals. (e.g. Chinese embezzlers who like the fact that the US won't extradite to China.)
Why should I care if they were criminals abroad? Just take their money. If they commit a crime here just pull their visa and deport them. No refunds!
We don't even have to bear the expense of a trial because pulling a visa doesn't require a criminal conviction.
> Something like 0.5-1% of households in Europe have >$1M in investable/liquid assets.
You say this like it's a bad thing. I welcome immigration from rich Europeans.
1% of European households have >$1M in cash. Of that fraction, I'd estimate that 0.0005% might consider, for more than 2 seconds, donating a huge fraction (in most cases the majority) of their wealth to the US government for expedited visa approval.
You're not going to get European immigration via this scheme, that's for sure.
The only people who are likely to pay are people who are exceptionally wealthy and exceptionally highly motivated to get out of wherever they currently reside. Fraudsters who won't be extradited, mostly.
Let's assume a high-net-worth individual with $1M of annual pre-tax cash flow split evenly among qualified dividends, long-term gains, and business income, and a $3M primary home. Let's also assume that this man lives in Texas, or he lives in Germany.
In Texas he'd owe about $304k in US federal income taxes (23.8% on dividends and gains; ~37% top rate on business income) plus roughly $54k of property tax at ~1.8%, for a total near $358k.
In Germany he'd pay ~26.375% on dividends and gains ($131.9k), a roughly 45% + 5.5% solidarity surcharge on the $500k business income (~$237.4k), and low property tax (~0.3% ≈ $9k), totaling ~$378k.
The difference comes out to just $20k. That said, all services are cheaper in Europe -- medical, telecoms, legal, etc. -- so life in Europe tends to be far less expensive in general.
And you'll note that I was extremely generous and picked a state without income tax. Many US states, perhaps most, are worse than Germany.
I also picked a middle-of-the-road European state. There are some that don't seem that interested in collecting taxes, e.g. certain Swiss cantons, some Baltic states, and Monaco. (No personal income tax on salaries, dividends, interest, or capital gains + no wealth tax!)
Dude, seriously. Think about these things before you post. The tax situation in the USA is way worse than you think it is, and it's way better in Europe than you imagine.
Agreed. I never understood why people are so against the rich immigrating to their country. Especially when they don't mind penniless undocumented migrants walking/floating across the border.
“Sec. 2. The Gold Card. (a) The Secretary of Commerce, in coordination with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Homeland Security, shall establish a “Gold Card” program authorizing an alien who makes an unrestricted gift to the Department of Commerce under 15 U.S.C. 1522 (or for whom a corporation or similar entity makes such a gift) to establish eligibility for an immigrant visa using an expedited process, to the extent consistent with law and public safety and national security concerns. The requisite gift amount shall be $1 million for an individual donating on his or her own behalf and $2 million for a corporation or similar entity donating on behalf of an individual”
Calling it a “gift” somehow manages to add an extra level of ick in my mind.
> Calling it a “gift” somehow manages to add an extra level of ick in my mind.
Yeah, it's a gross lie. The "gift" is clearly a fee.
The 'r' in gift is both silent and invisible.
When to elect a 1980s New York real estate developer into high office, don't be surprised when he views the entire world through a transactional lens (generally zero sum).
Whenever there's a transaction, that means that both parties give a different value to whatever is exchanged. For example, when you buy a home, the buyer prefers the house to the money and the seller prefers the money to the house. If this wasn't the case, the transaction just wouldn't take place.
So transactions are the opposite of a zero-sum game, they are a win-win game, where both parties end up winning. Because value is subjective.
This might be true for voluntary transactions. For others not so much.
Well, buying a gold card is a voluntary transaction.
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Does not sound that differend from the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Visa the US already has except for the fact that you gift the money to the feds instead of investing it in a company with 10 employees.
EB-5 requires a million dollar investment that creates 10 jobs for 2 years. There's also documentation of the source of the funds.
1 million dollars seems exceptionally cheap for a US resident visa with no strings attached.
In Canada some provinces have a similar process where you can run a business for a year and apply for permanent residency. In my city there were a bunch of weird little, clearly unprofitable franchises - bubble tea was one for a long time - where the owner was basically running it at a loss to buy citizenship.
It seemed to require a little more commitment to the community and effort than just handing over a big bag of cash. They've discontinued it in Ontario now, which has probably contributed to the glut of unoccupied commercial real estate.
Average usa tax revenue per labor force participant is currently $25k / year. Over a 40 year career, that’s exactly $1 million. Math checks out.
[dead]
The implementation is at https://trumpcard.gov where it says a "$1 million contribution, receive U.S. residency". For "$5 million contribution, you [can stay in the US] without being subject to U.S. taxes on non-U.S. income". There was an earlier flagged article for that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45308778. Concurrent to this was the H1B Visa fees: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45305845
You better think two or three or a thousand times before you buy one of these.
Just this week we found a homeless and black guy swinging from trees.
Honestly the “Gold Card” doesn’t worry me too much - the US has had investor visas for a long time.
The related “Platinum Card” on the other hand makes me absolutely livid. It means that for $5 million, there’s a status available that is arguably better than US citizenship, granting 270 days of presence in the U.S., and exemption from US taxation. I am a U.S. citizen who spends <30 days per year in the U.S., and I can’t even open an ISA in the UK where I live due to the US’s global tax rules, let alone anything more complex. To have citizenship based taxation and then grant a special status to foreign wealthy individuals is a slap in the face of decency.
270 days in the U.S. is also long enough to become tax non-resident in whatever country you’re spending the other 90 days in, making it likely that you’d be tax resident nowhere.
Yes, this is the real announcement. Global tax free status without all the usual tricks. One easy payment!
> My Administration has worked relentlessly to undo the disastrous immigration policies of the prior administration.
Genuinely ignorant here, but historically speaking, is it normal for the president to bad-mouth the previous administration so openly and often? Especially in writing like this.
Typically the president has a level of decorum. Snark is for proxies, not the leader / that’s typically a best practice for any executive, as it goes the principal the ability to walk stuff back later. That’s more of a norm than a rule.
The characters in the whack pack seem the use Andrew Jackson as a model. He was similarly tasteful and also a disaster.
Teddy Roosevelt did it best and against his own successor and own party.
No it is not and it is another lie Trump is using to destroy democracy. Typically a Potus whether he won by disagreeing (in reality or fiction) with the previous Potus, the newly elected would just move on and implement their agenda. Trump is doing this so to brand anything he does as a brilliant strategy and solution to whatever the past was. By creating blame on the system, anything you therefor come up with must be a tangible idea. All you need is for people to “give it a chance”. In reality everyone “giving it a chance” has no knowledge of how the current system works.
There is no advantage to doing this unless you are a vindictive, angry, petty PoS.
The important thing to keep in mind is that it is all fiction and it is ONLY Trump saying these things. It is important to let authoritarian ideas die on the vine rather than endlessly debate the strawmen and keep them alive, IMO.
Generally, yes. As part of an executive order, no.
I really do not believe this was the case before 45. One of the generally-agreed-upon criteria for presidential candidates was that they act "Presidential", which was understood to be a sort of universally unoffensive masculine stereotype? E.g. Before 2016 it would be unthinkable for the President of the United States to openly curse beyond a "TV-PG" way.
As I recall, other Presidents might decry Congress etc. but would almost never out-and-out criticize the direct previous official actions taken by the office of the Presidency.
No it really hasn’t been the norm outside the past 10 years or so. Historically the new administration gets a few months, then they own it.
> Generally, yes. As part of an executive order, no.
Huh? Can you offer a single example of this pre-Trump?
Some examples of Obama criticizing the Bush administration here: https://www.gbtribune.com/opinion/columnists/five-years-late...
lol, gtfo
“We inherited a financial crisis unlike any that we’ve seen in our time,”
That's a fact of reality. Trying to compare what Trump is doing to simply stating that we were in a financial crisis when Obama took over is while every single argument with someone from the right should be done knowing they don't stand on principles and will literally redefine words and reality to try and make a point.
This is a great question to find out how ignorant of American history most Americans are. The answer is sort of, but not really.
No, it's unprecedented. You can generally look at previous versions of the whitehouse website using the national archives, eg this one from the Bush 43 era:
https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/orders/
Also unprecedented is the use of Executive Orders to govern, as opposed to legislating through Congress, but that is not an entirely Trumpist thing, as Congress has been (take your pick) failing to govern/applying checks and balances for 20+ years now and across multiple administrations.
No, it's not normal. But Trump is making it the new normal to say sh*t about anybody not for him.
Should be named The Gold Big Beautiful Failed Democracy Card.
On the front a picture of Trump.
On the back pictures of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln weeping in despair at the sight of Neu Amerika.
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EB-5 is intended to create businesses and jobs in the US as part of the process. This is just straight-up "give us money and we'll give you residency".
On the other hand, it's not out of line with programs in other countries (ex. NZ's golden visa program)
Most of those "investments" for EB-5 visas are really just shares in "businesses" that hold piles of money for the "investors." The payment straight to the treasury is both more honest and more revenue for the government.
Jobs are created by economic demand, which rich people generate a lot of. So we get this either way.
NZ’s Active Investor Plus program is more like EB-5 than this. AIP requires that migrants invest their funds, not donate them. The Growth category requires fewer residency days and a NZ$5m (~US$3m) investment in “growth” companies or funds, including VC funds and companies that VC funds invest with. The Balanced category requires double the investment and has a wider range of asset classes, but also a longer duration and higher number of days of residency required.
Someone whose political instinct is to oppose anything trump does because they hate trump has been much more consistently correct, and a better predictor of the outcomes, than someone who has been trying to analyze each of his actions giving him the benefit of the doubt as a sincere actor each time.
The double whammy of conflation with bribing immigration officers and being done by Trump will be hard to get past, but evaluating the policy on it's own it seems like a net positive. Everyone who uses this must really want to be here and a million bucks to spend on food stamps or medicaid is a pure win.
He probably gets a commission on every freeloading, unneeded, parasitic billionaire he recruits.
A million bucks? Should have made it a billion.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45308778
Imagine if The Gold Card had an affiliate program.
honest question to non-US folks - does anyone even consider moving to the USA at this point?
I know literally dozens of people who would come even for an entry level job. I occasionally work as a volunteer assisting foreigners who want to work in the US tech industry.
Also, anecdotally, a friend just immigrated from Scandinavia to the US 3 months ago. He's loving it and has no plans to go back despite the political situation.
Most people are fairly isolated from the day-to-day political show. Life keeps going more or less the same across different presidents.
Sure, I’d move to the US for the right job and to the right place
Words fail me.
Most western countries have had these kind of visas for sale for decades. Nothing new or special.
Agreed. But why call it "donation"? Makes it sound sleazy. The $100k for H1-B aren't called "donation".
Yeah, it is very strange wording indeed.
Why? What do you think the negative effects will be?
So did someone talk him back from calling it the Trump Card? https://trumpcard.gov/
L'État, c'est moi
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27%C3%89tat,_c%27est_moi
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Excuse me? I voted twice against him.
Please don't use that word as it's highly offensive
I've edited it out after giving the word a more thorough review. I appreciate you raising it.
Now I'm curious what word it was...
Quite the opposite. More people opted not to vote than voted for any specific candidate.
I think that if the candidates can’t get a majority of the population to vote for them (not just a majority of the voters), the office should remain vacant.
Voter turnout was 64%. Trump got 49.8% of the votes compared to 48.3%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...
No. *I* did not. I (and many others) campaigned vigorously against it.
The fact that we did, the fact that we have consistently been right about everything, and that we still lost, will all continue to provide grand amusement and deep satisfaction to the victors as they proceed to crush us. What could be sweeter than such a perfect exercise of Power?
Twice; the first time wasn't enough.
If I lived in the US I probably of just not voted at all.
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Sounds good to me, but I think the price should be higher.
Why? Who do you think this will admit that a higher price would exclude, and why’s that a good thing?
$1 million just seems cheap for permanent residence. If there were other requirements like bringing a certain amount of assets into the country with you to generate tax revenue on the income stream then I would also be ok with it.
Is this a joke? Something like 0.5-1% of households in Europe have >$1M in investable/liquid assets. In the rest of the world, that fraction is much lower. A $1M gift -- that doesn't appear to guarantee results, only an expedited process -- strongly selects for oligarchs and criminals. (e.g. Chinese embezzlers who like the fact that the US won't extradite to China.)
Why should I care if they were criminals abroad? Just take their money. If they commit a crime here just pull their visa and deport them. No refunds! We don't even have to bear the expense of a trial because pulling a visa doesn't require a criminal conviction.
> Something like 0.5-1% of households in Europe have >$1M in investable/liquid assets.
You say this like it's a bad thing. I welcome immigration from rich Europeans.
1% of European households have >$1M in cash. Of that fraction, I'd estimate that 0.0005% might consider, for more than 2 seconds, donating a huge fraction (in most cases the majority) of their wealth to the US government for expedited visa approval.
You're not going to get European immigration via this scheme, that's for sure.
The only people who are likely to pay are people who are exceptionally wealthy and exceptionally highly motivated to get out of wherever they currently reside. Fraudsters who won't be extradited, mostly.
When you compare the tax rates between Europe and the US I would say that it's gonna be a bit more than 0.0005% of rich people.
Okay, so let's compare.
Let's assume a high-net-worth individual with $1M of annual pre-tax cash flow split evenly among qualified dividends, long-term gains, and business income, and a $3M primary home. Let's also assume that this man lives in Texas, or he lives in Germany.
In Texas he'd owe about $304k in US federal income taxes (23.8% on dividends and gains; ~37% top rate on business income) plus roughly $54k of property tax at ~1.8%, for a total near $358k.
In Germany he'd pay ~26.375% on dividends and gains ($131.9k), a roughly 45% + 5.5% solidarity surcharge on the $500k business income (~$237.4k), and low property tax (~0.3% ≈ $9k), totaling ~$378k.
The difference comes out to just $20k. That said, all services are cheaper in Europe -- medical, telecoms, legal, etc. -- so life in Europe tends to be far less expensive in general.
And you'll note that I was extremely generous and picked a state without income tax. Many US states, perhaps most, are worse than Germany.
I also picked a middle-of-the-road European state. There are some that don't seem that interested in collecting taxes, e.g. certain Swiss cantons, some Baltic states, and Monaco. (No personal income tax on salaries, dividends, interest, or capital gains + no wealth tax!)
Dude, seriously. Think about these things before you post. The tax situation in the USA is way worse than you think it is, and it's way better in Europe than you imagine.
Agreed. I never understood why people are so against the rich immigrating to their country. Especially when they don't mind penniless undocumented migrants walking/floating across the border.
It's because they don't envy the illegals
It’s likely designed to encourage taking out the capital as a loan.
A lot more people around the world can then afford to send their kids or pay off their gold cards across a 10-15 year timeframe.
*Obviously this depends on the income potential that is unlocked by having access to the U.S. workforce.
Nobody's loaning you money so that you can make a no-strings-attached gift, lol.
Well, nobody sane, anyway.
But what's the downside?
Anyone who can drop a million on permanent residence is most likely going to be significantly net positive for the economy.