President Donald Trump has plans to put his personal touch on the EB-5 visa program, which offers wealthy foreign investors a path to staying in the U.S.
“We're going to be selling a gold card,” Trump told reporters gathered in the Oval Office. “You have a green card, this is a gold card.”
It was his way of announcing his administration’s plan to bring an imminent end to the EB-5 visa program and replace it with a new investment path to citizenship. The administration said it plans to finish the transition within weeks, but details remain light and questions loom over how far the president’s authority reaches.
“The EB-5 program was full of nonsense, make-believe and fraud, and it was a way to get a green card that was low-priced,” U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said, standing behind Trump Tuesday afternoon. “So the President said, rather than having this sort of ridiculous EB-5 program, we're going to end the EB-5 program and we're going to replace it with the Trump gold card.”
Construction of New York's Hudson Yards was partially funded by EB-5 investors.
The current EB-5 visa program offers foreign investors a path to a green card by investing roughly $1M into job-creating projects, including real estate development. It has facilitated huge projects — including New York’s Hudson Yards and The Wharf in Washington, D.C. — has helped more than 100,000 people secure permanent legal status in the U.S. and was reauthorized by Congress in 2022.
Details of the planned replacement program haven’t been released. But Lutnick, a former real estate executive at Newmark and former head of the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, said the new visas would replace the existing EB-5 program in as little as three weeks.
Trump said his proposal has been legally vetted and can replace the current EB-5 program without approval from Congress, which created the program in 1990.
But Marlon Hill, an attorney at Weiss Serota who helps international entrepreneurs file visa petitions, said that Congress would have to be involved.
“Congress has to approve these changes to these visa-eligible categories, so we're still a ways away from knowing exactly what the fruit in the pudding is,” he told Bisnow Wednesday morning. “There's three branches of government, and certainly immigration law falls within the gamut of federal legislation.”
Still, congressional Republicans have thus far been supportive of the president’s agenda, even as some are facing backlash over billionaire Elon Musk’s moves at the Department of Government Efficiency.
Trump said the new gold card would also allow wealthy people to sponsor other immigrants' visas, suggesting it would be a way to pay to bring top talent into the country, although there was no mention of the existing and controversial H-1B worker visas during the press conference. Money raised through the program would go towards paying down the national debt, Trump said.
Trump's description of his plan Tuesday was roughly in line with how the current EB-5 program operates, but it is being floated as a total replacement. The existing program raised more than $2B in each of the last two years, much of which was directed toward sprawling real estate projects.
Real estate investment firm Peachtree Group, which launched its EB-5 arm in 2023, said in a statement that it ultimately suspected the gold card would be a supplement to the EB-5 program.
“President Trump has expressed support for legal, investment-driven immigration, and we look forward to engaging with his administration to ensure that any new program complements existing initiatives like EB-5,” Peachtree spokesperson Charles Talbert said in the statement.
The administration didn’t include any details about the status of the tens of thousands of EB-5 visa holders and whether they would be required to reach the new $5M threshold to secure permanent legal status. Hill suspects existing EB-5 program participants will keep their visas under the current law.
Lifting the price floor will make the program more exclusive, but most current participants are diversified investors who could meet the new requirements if necessary, Hill said.
“If you can do $1M, you can do $5M, these are very sophisticated business folks,” Hill said. “I don’t see it being an extraordinarily big deal, other than the fact that we're going to be a smaller percentage of people who are able to meet this threshold.”
