Why Trump’s $5 million ‘gold card’ visa will implode under its own weight

She said that living with me

Was bringing her down, yeah

For she would never be free

When I was around, oh

She’s got a ticket to ride…

—Ticket to Ride, Beatles, 1965

What is $5 million? In Trump 2.0, it is a passport for those who wish to emigrate to pursue the American dream and a pathway visa for US citizenship. Details of what he has articulated as the “ Gold Card Programme” will be available in two weeks, while the  $1 million EB-5 residency of the US will end. People from across the world wanting to buy into this scheme will go through a vetting process to ensure that they are “wonderful world-class global citizens”. Russian oligarchs will not be excluded. The Beatles’ ‘Ticket to Ride’ captures the poignancy of a man whose lover is leaving him; Trump’s ticket to America will carry no such sentiment.

At $5 million, not only is the price stratospheric, as an outright purchase it is money gone. Other countries require aspirants to bring that money into their financial system but retain it by investing in businesses or real estate. Immigrants get to retain their money while procuring a citizenship. In the case of the US, this money goes directly to the government. If one million rich, powerful and famous (RPF) buy into the Gold Card, the US government will make an easy $5 trillion, shaving off 14 per cent from its  $35 trillion debt.

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In the high-stakes and hugely-complex lives of RPF, financial diversification goes beyond  asset allocation. It embraces divergence across countries, through citizenships, around regulatory regimes. Among other things, a second citizenship (Canadians or Pakistanis, for instance) or a changed citizenship for countries that do not allow dual citizenships (Indians or Japanese) gives the RPF several options—legal protections and insurance against prosecution, easy mobility and asset protection, better higher education for children and safety, tax planning and ease of doing business, or something as bland as a better rule of law and clean air.

Given the price tag, buying the US Gold Card will make sense only to the ultra-rich (URPF), decamillionaires if not outright centimillionaires. The number of individuals with a  net worth of $50 million or more is 218,200; those with a net worth of more than $10 million is 2.8 million. So, President Donald J Trump is inviting the cream of the world to America, with open arms and a respectful seduction. But you don’t get to become ultra-wealthy by being naive. Reading above, between and below the lines that Trump is drawing, all URPF will get one signal—unpredictability. From the manner in which he is throwing the international rules-based order into the dustbin of history, or threatening countries that seek to hedge against the dollar, the signals for the URPF are mixed at best, and erratic at worst.

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In his America-First push, itself political, logical and perhaps necessary, Trump is changing the way business is conducted across the world. But it’s not merely business he is impacting, through tariffs and investments for instance. In his second term, he is disrupting the security infrastructure, particularly in Europe, and playing great power games that look no different from those being played by his adversaries Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. Trump is single-handedly destroying eighty years of an international rules-based order, drafted and enforced by the US.

Domestically too, Trump is disrupting the old political games. He is showcasing the power of the US state, at a time when China has risen, Russia is clearing strategic spaces for itself, India is rising, economic tides are moving eastward, and Europe is crumbling. While I am not commenting on the why of this, it is in this context that the URPF will decode and decide on this new Gold Card programme.

Why would any URPF throw good money into the US during this time of new uncertainties? According to the  Henley Citizenship Program Index 2025, there are competitive jurisdictions on offer. Reputationally and on quality of life, Austria, Egypt and Malta stand on top. In terms of investment requirements, Nauru (a donation of $105,000), Vanuatu (donation or real estate worth $115,000) and Malta (Euro 150,000)  are the cheapest. Overall, the price of a passport ranges from $105,000 to $1.5 million (for Jordan), with jurisdictions such as Portugal or Hungary (Euro 150,000 each), Greece (Euro 400,000) and Spain (Euro 500,000) offering competition to the US Gold Card.

Between 2013 and 2024, barring the 2020 blip and recovery, every year has seen the number of millionaires migrating. From 51,000 in 2013 they rose to 110,000 in 2019, fell to 12,000 during the Covid19 years, and stood at 128,000 in 2024. For 2025, the projections stand at 135,000. The latest data, for 2024, shows how millionaires have moved. The top three countries  from where millionaires are migrating are China (15,200), the United Kingdom (9,500) and India (4,300); their top three destinations are the United Arab Emirates (6,700), the US (3,800) and Singapore (3,500). Given such options, the $5 million price tag may be just a number, and the reduction of US national debt a fantasy.

The Gold Card Programme will implode under its own weight—the price is too high, the benefits too few, the environment too uncertain, the return on investment too unreliable, the potential risk too high. Most URPFs will watch what their peers do. All will stand on a common platform of risk mitigation. Their migratory clustering will develop only with scale. And unless Trump details out the benefits and embeds some predictability into the equation, the question before all of them will be: if citizenship or residency risk is not factored into the migration calculus, what is my $5 million buying?

Gautam Chikermane is Vice President, Observer Research Foundation. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.