JUST IN: President Trump announces a new immigration “Gold Card” that will be sold to immigrants for $5 million.
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) February 25, 2025
The Gold Card is a premium version of a Green Card, according to Trump, and will provide immigrants with a pathway to citizenship.
“We’re gonna be selling a gold… pic.twitter.com/U3Bx3Nogfd
A couple of thoughts:
— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) February 25, 2025
– We already have a similar program, the EB-5 visa, but that requires investing $500k or 1 million in US businesses and creating jobs, not just buying in.
– Trump can't do anything like this without Congress. The president can't sell green cards. Period. https://t.co/3PxkzTc2wn
The Gold Card is arguably the most “gilded” thing Trump has done yet.
“President Donald Trump says he’s open to attracting one kind of immigrant — people with money.
Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told reporters Tuesday that the administration plans to offer a “gold card” that would confer legal residency to foreigners at a cost of about $5 million. They said it would replace an existing U.S. visa program for overseas investors that’s long been mired in controversy. …”
I have mixed feelings about this.
On the one hand, the country is being flooded by a tsunami of legal and illegal immigrants and people who arrive on various forms of “temporary” work visas. Many of these people are worthless and have children who acquire citizenship as anchor babies. 99.999% of these people don’t have the ability to contribute anything like paying $5 million for citizenship to help pay down the deficit. At least the small number of legal immigrants who come in through this proposed Gold Card are seen as valuable because they can add something to the country. This is a different mindset from the system we have now where we are expected to absorb endless millions of people from the Third World as punishment for “racism.”
On the other hand, the Gold Card really does underscore the fact that we have become a plutocracy, so much so that we are throwing out the welcome mat for the world’s plutocrats. We are auctioning off citizenship and you have to be at least a millionaire to qualify.
“When, in the nineteen-nineties, people decided that we were living in a new Gilded Age, the meaning was plain. The term, borrowed from the 1873 Mark Twain novel of the same name—a mediocre book by a great writer with a memorable title, like Anthony Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now”—indicated an efflorescence of wealth and display, of overabundance and nouveau-riche excess. It referred mostly to the Veblenian side of American life: status competition through showy objects, from the cloud-level duplexes of the New York skyline to the Met Gala. Perhaps not enough attention was paid to the original concept, which implied a contrast between the truly golden and the merely gilded.
What we didn’t anticipate was that our new Gilded Age would become even more like its precursor—not only in the seeming concentration of overwhelming wealth into fewer and fewer hands but in the gravitation toward a plutocracy. In the industrial age, the totemic figures were Frick and Morgan and Rockefeller; in our post-industrial era, they are Bezos and Musk and Zuckerberg. During that first Gilded Age—if we imagine it running from the eighteen-seventies to 1910—a counter cast of characters had a glamorous appeal of their own. These were the anarchists, whose isolated but highly publicized acts of individual retaliation were intended as inspirational melodramatic theatre rather than as actual revolutionary politics. In these years, anarchists claimed the lives of a French President, an American President, an Italian king, and a Russian tsar, and threw bombs at several American tycoons. Whether or not Luigi Mangione’s recent alleged murder of a helpless insurance executive on a cold New York morning belongs to this tradition, its affect and effect certainly evoke the past, with the curly-haired Ivy-educated youth conferring, in the realm of social media, an improbable aura of martyrdom and purpose on what otherwise would have seemed a sordid act. …
Though James never uses the term “plutocrat,” plutocratic America is what he was examining. To what extent were his plutocrats like ours? The Gilded Age plutocrats made their money in steel (Carnegie), oil (Rockefeller), mining (Frick), and railroads (Vanderbilt), but in the main their business models were not so different from those of their counterparts today. Musk makes most of his money in hard industrial goods, mainly cars and satellites, while losing money on the digital-media front—just as that other carmaker, Henry Ford, futilely poured money into his antisemitic newspaper, the Dearborn Independent. Bezos, meanwhile, made much of his money by finding new ways for consumers to shop for more goods more efficiently while forcing smaller retailers out of business, exactly like Wanamaker and Woolworth in their day.
Yet real differences persist. The typical plutocrat who built the America, and particularly the New York, that James visited was a businessman with almost absolute freedom to act, and his political power was enormous. (It is worth recalling that Hitler’s constant insult to the democratic governments of Britain and America was that they were simply screens for predatory plutocrats.) Yet these men’s behavior was tightly circumscribed, at least in appearance. The plutocrats of the first Gilded Age were mostly content to influence from a distance, through intermediaries. For one thing, they were busy and living far away from Washington, at a time when that still mattered. For another, discretion had political advantages. When J. P. Morgan met with President Grover Cleveland in 1895, to discuss a deal to supply the government with gold while enriching Morgan’s syndicate with government-issued bonds, it was a scandal that contributed to Cleveland’s ouster the following year. Bezos and Musk have made a bet that increasing their economic power requires increasing their political power, in a fairly direct way. …”
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