In his agonizingly long recent address to Congress, President Trump floated a plan to create a new “gold card” visa. For the low price of $5 million, immigrants would be able to buy a pathway to citizenship.
Of course, Trump cannot create a new visa without the help of Congress. But just as importantly, this is a bad idea. It’s not only been tried before–it’s also failed to a degree that has made dozens of countries roll back similar policies in recent years.
A Global Phenomenon
The rich have long enjoyed access to so-called “golden visas” or “golden passports,” schemes where foreigners are given access to residency or even citizenship in exchange for purchasing property or making investments in a new country.
Upwards of 100 countries have offered similar investment migration deals in the past, but in recent years that number has begun to dwindle.
One of the main reasons countries are phasing out these programs? To tackle rising housing prices. Critics argue that the wealthy migrants who take advantage of these visas distort housing markets by paying far over market value for living spaces.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced last year that the program that allowed non-European Union citizens to obtain residency by investing $540,000 in cash in real estate would be eliminated explicitly to tackle skyrocketing housing prices.
The phenomena of residency by investment programs first appeared in the late 1980s as a way to attract foreign investment. The United States, for example, adopted the EB-5 visa in 1990, offering permanent residence to foreigners who invest between $1 and $2 million in job-creating businesses.
Some of the most popular programs are the ones in Europe–primarily because of the benefits that residency or citizenship in the region can grant, like ease of travel within the Schengen Zone and access to top-notch medical treatment and education. Over 130,000 people have received residency or citizenship in the European Union through similar programs.
These investment schemes–offered at one point or another by Cyprus, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Luxemburg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain–sprung up at the beginning of the 2010s as a way to bring in foreign investment to overcome the financial crisis.
The world’s ultra wealthy obliged.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt quietly applied for Cypriot citizenship in 2020, allowing him free movement around a Europe that was largely shut down for outsiders during the pandemic. Cyprus shuttered its program mere months afterwards and ended up stripping citizenship from 222 investors, including many Russian oligarchs linked to the conflict in Ukraine.
Spain issued an estimated 6,200 visas in exchange for property investments between 2013 and 2023. Portugal has issued 12,718 since 2012. In both countries, the most visas were granted to Chinese citizens.
Even European countries without explicit golden visas brokered similar deals with the wealthy–Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel became a French citizen in 2018 for contributing to the country’s “influence.”
And the rich haven’t limited themselves to European deals.
The most infamous is the case of former PayPal CEO and reactionary political activist Peter Thiel, who in 2011 was granted citizenship in New Zealand after only 12 days in the country.
More recently, Open AI CEO Sam Altman was given Indonesia’s first ever “Golden Visa.” In a press release, the government said they expect Altman to “contribute to developing artificial intelligence in Indonesia.”
Rolling Back the Tide
But have countries benefited from this influx of wealthy investors?
New research has suggested that the economic gains are minor. A 2022 report from the Melbourne-based Grattan Institute found that investors granted residency in Australia brought limited benefits to the country because they tended to be older and didn’t contribute much in taxes. Many of them ended up costing the state more in public services than they pay in taxes. Australia axed its investment program, launched in 2012, earlier this year.
There may also be negative knock-on effects, like inviting and even encouraging the wealthy to snap up properties,crowding out working residents from the housing market–think gentrification on a country-level. Lawmakers in Spain and Portugal both cited the role of investment for visa programs in spiking housing prices when scrapping and revising their programs this year, respectively. Research on the Portuguese case backs up the link to housing stocks.
To be clear, migrants writ-large have minimal impacts on rising housing prices. The issue is with exorbitantly wealthy newcomers, who distort markets and force working-class people out of their homes. The problem isn’t restricted to foreign billionaires–investors in the U.S. have also driven up prices by treating the housing stock like a commodity.
Rethinking Migration Restrictions
Governments worldwide appear to be wising up on the reality of golden visas. Spain, Portugal, Australia, and Cyprus have all recently modified or scrapped their investment for residency or citizenship schemes.
Ireland shut down its program after 11 years in 2023, citing concerns that it could be facilitating Russian money laundering. The United Kingdom did the same the year prior.
Greece raised the investment needed to qualify for residency from €500,000 to €800,000 in popular areas in response to spiking housing prices. Cyprus and Bulgaria scrapped their programs at around the same time over concerns about Russian oligarchs abusing the rules for money laundering and tax evasion.
Instead of creating a new “gold card” scheme in the United States, we should rethink restrictions on movement in general.
That ease with which the world’s wealthy can traverse borders should be expanded to the rest of us. Freedom of movement is a right we should all have, a right that people had for tens of thousands of years before the rise of the modern nation state. Reducing barriers to migration will only become more important as climate change and resource depletion make regions inhospitable.
A just immigration system should neither reward you for being rich nor punish you for being poor.