Trump tells Congress gold card is coming “very, very soon”

In a divisive and lengthy address to a joint session of Congress, Donald Trump took a moment to talk about something near and dear to the real estate industry: his proposed “gold card.”

During Tuesday night’s speech to congress, the president said the gold card would go on sale “very, very soon.” Trump said the card would “allow the most successful job-creating people from all over the world to buy a path to U.S. citizenship.”

“It’s like the green card, but better and more sophisticated,” Trump stated.

Details remain scant on the gold card program. What’s known is that individuals who invest $5 million in the country can carve a path towards citizenship; there will be a job creation component, too.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has claimed the program already has 250,000 applicants — though applications for gold cards haven’t actually launched yet.

It’s also unclear if Trump will try to bypass Congress to create the program, since the elected body is responsible for any citizenship-related policies. The White House has not officially announced the gold card program.

Trump teased the program a week ago as a replacement for the EB-5 program, an investment vehicle for the real estate industry. EB-5 — once referred to as the “crack cocaine of real estate financing” — was created by Congress in 1990 to grant visas to foreign investors who spend about $1 million and employ at least 10 people in the country.

The program has also been perceived as being vulnerable to fraud, including misrepresentation of investment opportunities, falsifying documents and misallocating investor funds.

“It’s not reality,” Nick Mastroianni of the U.S. Immigration Fund, one the largest EB-5 regional centers, told The Real Deal. “There is zero chance of a substantial amount of people investing $5 million.” 

— Holden Walter-Warner