Capital Ideas: Gold Card Plan Can’t Trump EB-5
The idea to remake a popular funding source has CRE execs scratching their heads.
Over the years, we’ve published several articles about the benefits of the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program, which enables foreign investors to invest in U.S. job-creating commercial initiatives in exchange for a Permanent Resident Card, also known as a Green Card. The private capital investments, which range from $800,000 to $1.8 million depending on the area, have typically been used as a lower-cost funding source for commercial real estate development projects.
So CRE executives were surprised when President Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced last week that the EB-5 program would be transformed into a plan that sells “Gold Card” visas (Green Cards with extra benefits) to foreign citizens for $5 million. It seems these funds would be used for government purposes, like paying down the national debt.
“It really isn’t a modification at all because it’s completely different,” Reid Thomas, chief strategy officer for deposit management company Ampersand Inc., told me.
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With origins as a job creation program, Thomas said, EB-5 has more in common with the Opportunity Zone program, which also drives private investment and job creation to high-need areas, than the public fund-raising plan than Trump has described. Of course, for OZ investors, the carrot is tax breaks rather than a path to citizenship.
Created in 1990 by the Immigration Act of 1990, EB-5 enables investors (and their spouses and children) to gain Green Cards by investing in U.S. businesses that create at least 10 full-time jobs in the U.S. Investors can invest in their own businesses or in investment pools known as Immigrant Investor Regional Centers. The Regional Center program was launched in 1992 as a pilot and has been renewed each year since.
EB-5 was reauthorized in 2022 with the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act, which infused sweeping guardrails into a program that had seen some fraud and abuse. Today, investors are heavily vetted, and jobs must be proven to have been created in Targeted Employment Areas, Thomas said. Regional Center pools are required to have a fund administrator, and if the project is proven to be successful, investors get their principal back.
That’s why, Thomas noted, Secretary Lutnick “was not well informed” when he said that EB-5 was a “poorly overseen, poorly executed” program. “There’s quite a lot of rigor around the program that has been enhanced,” Thomas said.
Unlike some of President Trump’s other proclamations during his first six weeks, this plan has only been announced verbally—not by Executive Order. More details are expected in the coming weeks. Two big questions are: What are the extra perks that come with having a Gold Card vs. a Green Card? Will the Gold Card buyers get a return on their investment?
During last week’s cabinet meeting, President Trump said the program might be used by corporations that want to hire highly qualified foreign graduates of U.S. universities, and during his address to Congress last night, he said the program would bring in “brilliant, hardworking, job-creating people” (“big producers, big taxpayers”) while the U.S. gets rid of immigrants who are “criminals and child predators.”
Since the program was created by Congress, it doesn’t seem that it could be legally eliminated or changed with the stroke of a pen. Nevertheless, let’s hope that President Trump and Secretary Lutnick learn more about the benefits of EB-5 before morphing it into something that eliminates a reliable funding source for CRE.
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