Trump’s “Gold Card” Immigration Grift Might Actually Be Happening

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is building a system to process and sell so-called “gold card” visas to paying customers, according to The New York Times. That’s right: the right to live in America is so sacred, the Trump administration seems to be implying, that is snatching students off the street for writing critical op-eds and locking up scientists for carrying frog embryos through customs—all while selling a path to citizenship off to the highest bidder.

Donald Trump first announced the idea in February, saying that gold cards would provide a “route to citizenship” for “very high level people,” including, for instance, Russian oligarchs. “Hey, I know some Russian oligarchs that are nice people,” the president said at the time.

Now, the Times reports, work on that system is well underway. The people reportedly building it? Marko Elez, the software engineer who once boasted that he was “racist before it was cool” and that he wants “a eugenic immigration policy;” as well as Edward Coristine, the 19-year-old former intern who reportedly worked for a cybercrime ring and goes by the online moniker Big Balls.

Yes, really.

Trump has said that the “gold cards,” which would replace EB-5 visas currently reserved for foreign investors, would go for $5 million a piece. It’s a remarkable level of grift even for this administration. But as experts have noted, Trump can’t lawfully eliminate Congress’s existing immigration laws any more than he can lawfully eliminate all of the spending Congress has allocated and that courts have consistently ordered him to unfreeze.

“People will be paying for something Trump cannot provide,” David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian think tank Cato Institute wrote in February. Even if Trump tried, Bier wrote, it’s unlikely to do the numbers he seems to think it will. “Even when high-net-worth individuals want to immigrate to the United States, the current immigration system usually provides those individuals with other, cheaper alternatives,” Bier wrote.

Of course, as the last three months have shown, just because Trump can’t legally do something doesn’t mean he won’t. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said last week that the gold card program would begin “within a week and a half.”