USA Immigration ‘gold card’: What is it, and how could it impact our immigration system? 

Of note:

The Bush Institute is a proponent of increasing legal immigration pathways to the U.S., including raising or eliminating per-country caps on green cards. Will the gold card help? 

While the devil is in the details, right now it seems as if the gold card could be a new legal pathway for potential immigrants. But it could also make it harder to qualify for the existing EB-5 program, making a current legal pathway more difficult.  

There are two major policy issues with this proposal. First, while investment and job creation are great, this program doesn’t bring in the workers the U.S. economy needs to fill the open jobs it already has. Even if you assume that a company would pay a high fee to keep, attract, or retain a foreign worker, that’s not a sustainable model to fill the nearly 8 million open jobs in the U.S. The current EB-5 program doesn’t either. Job creation is a wonderful policy goal, but we still need millions of workers to fill open positions.  

Second, similar visa programs around the world have been criticized for being easy targets for corrupt individuals looking to buy their way into countries. Any investor visa program, whether the proposed gold card or the current EB-5, will need to have appropriate vetting and safeguards built in to protect against this possibility.  

Source: Immigration ‘gold card’: What is it, and how could it impact our immigration system?