The Donald Trump administration has been teasing a Gold Card visa that would give US citizenship to the richest people who are ready to spend $5 million to become US citizens, but as it is yet to see the light of day, experts feel it probably does not exist. Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick said the website trumpcard.gov would go live within a week but now that deadline is now over, an expert told Forbes that it is probably not even real. Lutnick, however, claimed he sold Gold Card visas in the Middle East during his latest trip. In an earlier interview, Lutnick said he sold 1000 such visas in a day. Nuri Katz, founder of Apex Capital Partners, told Forbes that the challenges to pull off something like this are daunting. “In my 34 years of experience, I have rarely seen anybody spend more than 10% of their net worth on an immigration program, and generally it’s more like 5%. So you’ve got to be worth $100 million in order to be able to afford this,” Katz said adding that unlike what is being portrayed, the pool of such wealthy people who are willing to contribute $5 million is relatively small. Even if the government launches the Gold Card visa program any time soon, it won’t be a million people and it won’t be even 200,000. “It looks to me like they’re backpedaling,” Katz said. “Now they have to make a decision of whether or not there really is the interest, because they are going to have to expend a lot of political capital in order to get this done,” Katz said. Ultra-wealthy investors will be skeptical about such program and will wait for more details, he said. “We don’t know where that information is going to go and who’s going to use it. Will it be used only by the U.S. government? Could it maybe be sold to private businesses? It’s going to be a pretty powerful database of rich people.”A few weeks ago, Elon Musk said he was doing a quiet trial of the program but now that he is back to his companies, it is not known what happened to the Gold Card visa program.
