President Trump’s proposal to create a U.S. gold card isn’t really new. Since 1882, the United States has charged immigrants an admission fee for coming to the country, starting at $0.50 a person and raising it to $4 in 1907.

Today, the U.S. already has a special visa program for those able to make substantial investments. Substantial as in $800,000. The U.S.has had a golden visa program since the early 1990s. It comes in the form of EB five and it’s been traditionally used to build big real estate projects in the U.S. So even places like Hudson Yards in New York City has been funded through this sort of program. Kristen Schreck is an assistant professor at the London School of Economics, where she has studied what is
known as investment immigration.

The revived push in the U.S. parallels other countries experimenting with golden visas and passports.
They’re actually much more common than most people think.

So for thinking about the golden passport programs of citizenship, there’s over 20 countries with legal
provisions that enable this, and there’s about a dozen that regularly approve people through their programs for thinking about the residents Golden Visa programs. They’re all over the place.

You can find them in just about 60 countries, five territories.
Even in places like the US and half of the EU member states, the programs vary according to how much money is required, whether it’s an investment in the
country and what kind of investment or just a fee paid to the government. And by the way, whether the immigrant
only gets to reside in the country or actually becomes a citizen.

Golden passports are sometimes also
known as citizenship by investment.
So these are programs where you donate
to a government or invest in a country
and in pretty short order and sometimes
without even ever going to the country,
you become a citizen.

It’s a little bit different to a golden
Visa program where you get not
citizenship in the country, but
residence in the country.
Whatever form these programs take, the
goal is always the same growing the
economy of the host country.
And the smaller the country, the more of
a difference they can make.
Investment immigration programs account
for up to half of the GDP of the island
nations of Dominica, Saint Kitts and
Saint Lucia.

So usually the idea is to bring
investments into the country.
Now, if we’re talking about very, very
small states, and usually they’re the
ones who are doing the citizenship
programs.

The amount of money that a government
can bring in through these programs can
be absolutely enormous.

So some countries see well over 30% of
GDP coming in through these programs.
So if you’re thinking about the golden
Visa programs where you’re just getting
residents, we’re often talking about
much bigger economies in terms of what
countries get out of it will be more
targeted if we’re looking at those
investments.
But that’s where the math doesn’t always
add up.
One immigrant’s investing can be one
local citizens crowding out, as in real
estate.

Take Spain, for example.
We’ve seen Spain shut its program down,
Ireland shut its program down.
The U.K.
shut its program down.
And if you’re only approving a couple
hundred people per year, a hundred
applications per year, is it really
worth it to keep on the books?
Given the potential risk involved,
Spain’s scramble for investment began
after the European debt crisis of 2009.
Since the start of its program in 2013,
Spain granted more than 15,000 visas
tied to real estate investment.
From 2016 to 2023.
The program generated $10 billion in
investments, but that also helped drive
up property values.
I repeat, innovation, except for the
Cuban people.
You know, parking is simply renting.
Buscaglia speculative Colombian commerce
lab in Spain shut down its program as of
April.
But even as countries like Spain have
cut back.

Others, like New Zealand are ramping up.
We’ve had about 200 people apply, which
is about 150 more than applied in the
previous two years. So it’s becoming more and more popular. Stuart Nash is a former minister of
economic Development in New Zealand and
is now a principal in Nash Kelly, which
works to attract high net worth
individuals to the country. What are the requirements?
Yes, so there are two categories.

We’ve got the growth category and you
got to invest 5 million Kiwi, which is
about 3 million us. And then we’ve got one called the
balance category, which you’ve got to
invest 10 million Kiwi, which again is
about 6 million us, You’ve got to do
that over six months for the, for the
growth category. It’s got to be in managed funds or, or
companies. The balance category, it’s a little
wider.

You can do bonds, you can do equities,
you can also do manage funds and
businesses as well.

So, you know, we really get at Nash
Kelly that if you’re sitting in America,
you’re looking at New Zealand that looks
like this oasis that you want to go to.
You’ve read about it. Kiwis are really friendly.
You know about the golf courses you know
about.

The environment, but you don’t know much
about the investment ecosystem.
So it’s a little bit of a risk when you
put together your program in New
Zealand.

Did you go to school, as it were, on
some of the other programs and say, We
don’t want to do that, we’re going to
structure it this way instead?
Yeah.
Very much so.
So you’re in Portugal.
I think you only have to invest
$200,000.
It’s not a lot of money in New Zealand.
We decided that, you know, we want the
people who can drive success who have
been successful.
The European Court of Justice has just
ruled the Malta Golden Visa are illegal
because it’s bringing in, they think, or
has a potential to bring in a whole lot
of dirty money.
We didn’t want that in New Zealand.
Hence the reason why the high level of
integrity to prove that the money you’re
investing in New Zealand has come from
legitimate means.
We didn’t want this to be a back door
for criminal money coming in.
The cost of granting residency to the
wrong people, as Nash puts it, is just
one of the things countries have to take
into account in determining whether
investment immigration is worth it.
There can be a lot of concerns about
foreigners coming and xenophobic
sentiments.
You know, are you can find them across
the world in various measures as well.
So governments have to balance what they
think are appropriate trade offs in
terms of how many foreigners do we want
allow in the country, Because sometimes
you can have people who have a lot of
money, but maybe they gained it through
nefarious means or maybe,
you know, there could be shady things in
the background.
So making sure that these are the people
you want to let in is also a very
important decision to make.
Screening out undesirable candidates for
immigration may help make sure the right
people are admitted and that their money
is going into the right projects.
But it also can get in the way, as it
does for the current U.S.
program, according to Alex, Nebraska
vice president for economic and social
policy studies at Cato Institute.
So the EB five is a portion of the
employment based green card in the
United States.
There are 10,000 of these visas set
aside for EB five every year, but we’ve
seen in recent years is basically about
5000 of those are taken up by actual
investors.
It costs at least $800,000 or around
$800,000 to make an investment in the
US.
It has to create certain number of jobs.
DB five system has not worked well and
the primary reason is exactly what you
said, which is it’s an incredibly
complicated visa, it’s very burdensome
to work through.
So it’s really suffered under this
incredible burden of red tape that just
keeps piling on decade after decade in
the United States.
President Trump’s gold card idea would
cut through much of this by simply
putting a price tag on admission into
the country.
We don’t know all the details of
President Trump’s gold card proposal.
It hasn’t been passed into law by
Congress, and he doesn’t have the legal
authority to issue green cards based on
this.
But as far as we know the details, it
would be selling lawful permanent
residency, also known as a green card in
exchange for a $5 million fee paid to
the US government.
This is a fee pay.
This is not an investment.
This is not an investment that these
foreigners would get to own in the
United States.
But it is a straight up fee paid to the
United States government of $5 million.
If in truth, Congress were to adopt this
approach and pass legislation so it was
legal, could it make a material
difference to the debt or the deficit?
The United States?
It’s very unlikely that selling gold
cards like this would make a material
large difference to the US deficit or US
spending.
For one, the price is way too high.
But Nowrasteh does think that the
president may be on to something,
creating a market for US admission and
letting Adam Smith do the rest.
Something suggested some time ago by
Nobel Prize winning economist Gary
Becker.
Our fiscal problems go far beyond what
can be resolved by selling a gold card.
However, the price for a lot lower if
the price for, say, like $100,000 or
$200,000, I think you could see a large
increase in a number of wealthier
immigrants coming to the United States
to settle.
That would produce extra economic
activity here that the government could
tax and there would be a huge increase
in visa fees paid to the US government.
So I think, ironically, the only way
that we could actually make a difference
in the deficit through such a scheme
would be by lowering the price
dramatically if you had total control
and could design any system that you
wanted, what would it look like?
I probably go back to the 19th century
and make it just incredibly easy for
people to come to the United States
lawfully so long as they aren’t a
criminal or a national security threat
or a sick.
But if I have to charge a price, if I
have to have a restriction on the number
of immigrants coming to the US, I would
charge a price.
I would sell visas.
It’s a sort of economics 1 to 1 if you
have scarcity of a good or service and
that good or service can be efficiently
allocated only through the pricing
mechanism, only by charging a price and
only by allocating those visas to those
who are willing to pay.
Hey, the price.
So charging a price for a visa is a very
good way to allocate them to people who
really want it.
How do we make sure we get the right
people in?
So what a pricing system does is it
internalizes the costs and benefits of
these decisions to the people who
actually make them.
And as a result, we’re going to get a
much better mix of people selected by
the market economy who can do much
better here in the United States than
those who could be selected by Congress.
Nebraska says that a market based system
could even help address the country’s
struggles with illegal immigration by
providing a legal path.
A market based system would undermine
illegal immigration to the United States
because it would give an avenue for even
low skilled immigrants like illegal
immigrants, to come here lawfully.
Currently, what we see is that illegal
immigrants pay upwards of $10,000 in
smuggling fees to come to the United
States, and they don’t even have a
guaranteed way to stay.
So it’s a highly risky investment.
If instead those individuals could
borrow money or could get loans from
their family members or could otherwise
save up wages in their own country, then
they can buy one of these green cards
come to the United States.
They don’t have to come illegally.
You actually have a goalpost where if
they make a certain amount of money in
their home country, they can afford to
buy one of these visas and come here.
It would really undermine the black
market.
It would undermine human smuggling.
It would destroy those markets, and it
would allow a way for even low and
middle skilled workers to be able to
come here, because ultimately, it’s just
the price.
It’s just amount of money.
You and I, we’re not super wealthy
individuals in the U.S.
that we can borrow money for economic
activities.
I think that banking systems throughout
the world of financial institutions
would be falling over themselves, head
over heels to give loans to these
individuals, to buy green cards, to come
to the United States to be able to work
because the returns on them are so high,
these people would be willing and able
to repay them.
There are enormous market and profit
opportunities for them.
This is something that would be a boon
to the US financial system, to the
workers involved, and to the US economy
at large.
The American economy runs on immigrant
labor and benefits from the fruits of
globalization and the wealth of nations.
Adam Smith wrote that it is not from the
benevolence of the butcher, the brewer
or the baker that we expect our dinner,
but from their regard to their own
interest.
If residency in the country is, the
dinner markets might set the right price
for immigrants to pay.