Trump's $1 million 'gold card' immigration program is close to launching. Here's what's ahead.

By Victor Reklaitis

'This program is not going to be as easy as the administration initially claimed,' says one expert in immigration law

The Trump administration's "gold card" immigration program is due to be implemented by Dec. 18, according to an executive order issued in September.

President Donald Trump proposed a new "gold card" visa program in February, then in September ordered his administration to "take all necessary and appropriate steps" by Dec. 18 to implement the program, which aims to attract well-off immigrants who would pay $1 million each to the U.S. government for immigration status.

With Trump's deadline approaching, is the U.S. now close to seeing a big influx of gold-card holders - wealthy masses yearning to breathe free, so to speak?

Not exactly, as uptake may take time, according to immigration experts.

"I think there will be relatively few applicants at the beginning, but maybe in a year or two, we'll start to see an uptick in applications," said Stephen Yale-Loehr, an expert in immigration law who retired last year after decades as a professor of immigration practice at Cornell Law School.

Another immigration program, known as the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program, launched in 1990 and only started to take off a couple of years later after Congress made changes to it, he noted.

It's a "good first step" that the administration has released a draft form for the gold card, but the form reveals details that indicate "that this program is not going to be as easy as the administration initially claimed," Yale-Loehr said.

Those details include a $15,000 application fee; a required gift of $1 million per person, rather than just $1 million per family; a vetting process that looks at whether applicants got their $1 million in a valid way; and the program's reliance on existing green-card categories known as EB-1 and EB-2, "each of which have backlogs for certain countries," according to Yale-Loehr. That reliance on existing categories likely means Congress won't need to pass a new law, but the gold card is going to have to be codified in new regulations eventually, he added.

David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said he has doubts that the Trump administration has the authority to do what it's doing without action by Congress, and he also has concerns about the gold card's high price. Those issues could lead to low demand for the new program in the weeks and months ahead, according to Bier.

"People are not going to want to pay for something that might be suddenly deemed unlawful - and then what's the process to get your money back?" he told MarketWatch. Bier said it's a good idea in theory to let people simply pay a fee to immigrate to the U.S., given how difficult it is to immigrate legally, but added that the gold card's price tag of $1 million is probably too high.

Price cut from $5 million

In February, the president called for a "Trump gold card" program that would provide foreign investors who put up at least $5 million with U.S. residency and a path to citizenship. Then, in his Sept. 19 executive order, the president cut the required amount for the gold-card holder's "unrestricted gift" to the U.S. Commerce Department to $1 million, or $2 million if a corporation or other entity is donating on behalf of an individual.

In June, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said around 70,000 people had signed up at that point on the administration's waitlist for gold cards.

So-called golden visa programs exist in many parts of the globe - in the Caribbean, the Middle East, throughout Europe and in the Asia-Pacific region, including in Australia and Hong Kong, as MarketWatch has reported. The programs often call for foreign investors to invest capital into a specific fund that a nation sets up to pay for some objective, and they're rewarded with legal residency and sometimes even citizenship in that country. One key downside is the programs tend to spark concerns that investors are helping to drive up home prices.

Yale-Loehr said there's likely to be criticism of Trump's gold card from either end of the political spectrum. "Progressive will say people should not be allowed to buy their way into the United States; MAGA types will say we shouldn't be encouraging any type of legal immigration," he said.

Single individuals could be most likely to apply for the gold card rather than investors with families, since unlike the long-running EB-5 program, the new card doesn't require a plan to create at least 10 U.S. jobs, according to Yale-Loehr. "But if I'm a family of four and I want to immigrate to the U.S., that's $4 million, so that gets a little pricey," he said.

Meanwhile, the EB-5 program offers visas for a family in exchange for an investment of at least $800,000. The administration has indicated it would like to get rid of EB-5 visas, but experts say that only Congress could do that.

Will the administration actually meet Trump's deadline of Dec. 18 for implementing the gold card?

"They can always put out a form and ask for money," Cato's Bier said. "Putting out a form isn't hard, so if the president wants to get it done, I think it will happen."

The White House didn't respond to MarketWatch's request for comment.

Trump's September executive order said the steps that must be completed by Dec. 18 include specifying the date on which individuals or sponsors can start giving their $1 million or $2 million gifts.

Aarthi Swaminathan contributed.

-Victor Reklaitis

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12-07-25 0900ET