President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday to establish the “Gold Card” visa pathway, where “extraordinary” foreigners can pay $1 million to the United States for expedited immigrant visas.
Trump signed the order in the Oval Office accompanied by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf. While foreigners have the option of paying $1 million to the Treasury, a corporation can sponsor them for $2 million.
“One of the biggest problems we have is that people, they go to the best schools and they do great and they get great marks, and then they’re thrown out of the country,” Trump said. “You’re not allowed to stay.”
“This way, a corporation will be able to — sort of like a signing bonus in baseball or football — a corporation will be able to get them to stay in the country, and I think it’s going to be tremendously successful,” he added.
Lutnick detailed that the employment-based Green Card program allowed 281,000 immigrants into America annually, who earned on average $66,000. He said, “they were five times more likely to go on assistance programs of the government.”
“So we were taking in the bottom quartile, below the average American. It was illogical, the only country in the world that was taking in the bottom quartile,” he added.
The Commerce secretary expressed that Gold Card visa holders will be job creators, not takers, in America.
“So what we are doing now is we are going to stop doing that. We’re going to only take extraordinary people at the very top. Instead of people trying to take the jobs from Americans, they’re going to create businesses and create jobs for Americans,” he explained, predicting the Gold Card will drive more than $100 billion into the Treasury.
Trump also signed a proclamation on Friday to restrict admission “of certain H-1B aliens as nonimmigrant workers” by increasing the fee companies must pay to sponsor them to $100,000, according to a White House fact sheet.
“So the whole idea is, no more will these big tech companies or other big companies train foreign workers. They have to pay the government $100,000 then they have to pay the employee. So it’s just not economic,” Lutnick said.
“If you’re going to train somebody, you’re going to train one of the recent graduates from one of the great universities across our land. Train Americans. Stop bringing in people to take our jobs,” he added.
