Gold Card: a million dollars, given away rather than invested

The form is called I-140G. The agency describes its purpose like this: it is used by an individual or a corporation to apply for an employment-based immigrant visa under the Gold Card program created by Executive Order 14351.

Then come the numbers, which are the real news. The agency estimates annual applicants at 1,520 individuals and 72 corporations. Each response is expected to take five hours.

That is roughly 1,600 applications a year. For comparison: the green card lottery hands out up to 55,000 visas every year, and the employment-based categories many times that in total.

By its own agency's expectations, then, the Gold Card is no mass program. It is a niche for very few people with a great deal of money.

The idea is simple, and unusual for a country that has traditionally built immigration on family, work and merit: give the government a large sum and you get a fast track to permanent residence.

Unlike the older investor visa, this is not an investment you can get back once the business is up and running. The money is a gift. It is gone.

The program uses existing immigration categories and treats the payment as a supporting element. So it creates no new visa category in law; it lays a new practice over existing ones.

That is exactly where the legal criticism comes in, and anyone thinking about applying should know it: a program based on an executive order rather than an act of Congress can be changed or ended by a future administration.

I don't want to have a moral debate here. I want to do the math.

Take a European business family with a seven- to eight-figure fortune who want to move to the United States for good. They have at least three routes, all of them cheaper.

The E-2 investor visa. Most of Europe, including the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands and the Nordic countries, are treaty countries. A substantial investment in an active business that you run is enough. Depending on the industry, that means a low six-figure sum, and the money is not gone: it sits in your own business. It does not lead to a green card, but it can be renewed indefinitely.

The L-1 followed by an EB-1C. If you run a European company and build a US subsidiary, you can be transferred as an executive and, in many cases, move on to permanent residence from there. Cost: attorneys and structure, not a gift.

The EB-1A for extraordinary ability. No money, just a strong file. If you can prove you are at the top of your field, this gets you in without an employer and without an investment.

All three are grounded in statute and have been established for decades. The details are in E-2 investor visa, L-1 visa and EB-1A green card.

There are situations where the usual routes don't work, and a program like this is built for them.

If you come from a country that is not a treaty country for the investor visa, that route is closed to you. If you don't want to run a business but live off your wealth, you fit no employment-based category. If you come from a country with a long backlog in the regular categories, you may wait decades.

For these people the Gold Card may be the only predictable route, and then the question is not whether it is expensive but whether there is an alternative.

For most Europeans, there almost always is one.

The tax side. Permanent residence makes you a US tax resident, taxed on your worldwide income. If you have substantial European wealth, use the year before you move to put the structure in place. Afterwards, many options are closed.

Estate tax. It is the point wealthy immigrants overlook most often. US estate tax hits residents on their worldwide assets, and special rules apply to non-American spouses that you need to know. Start with US estate tax for non-US citizens.

And how durable the program is. If you make a seven-figure gift, you should know what your status rests on and what happens if that basis goes away.

The market for bought residence is old, and Europe invented it. Portugal, Greece, Spain and Malta ran programs for years tied to property purchases, fund investments or donations. The European Commission pushed hard against them, and several programs have been closed or tightened.

The American version differs in one fundamental way, and it decides the whole assessment: in Europe you usually buy a residence right that does not trigger tax on your worldwide income unless you actually live there. In the United States you buy a status that does exactly that, from day one.

That makes a US green card a far heavier document, tax-wise, than a Portuguese residence card. Get one and then live mostly in Europe, and you have the worst of both worlds: US filing obligations without an American life.

That is why, with wealthy clients, we almost always talk about the tax consequences first and the route second. Reversing that order regularly costs six figures.

For many wealthy Europeans there is a solution that costs neither a million nor requires a green card: stay a non-resident for good and still do business in the United States.

You form an American company, do business there, hold real estate, invest, travel in on business and stay tax resident in Europe or a third country. It is entirely legal, long established and, for many families, by far the better deal financially. This exact model, the US LLC without a US permanent establishment, is the specialty of our sister site zerotax.llc.

It only works if you keep your days of presence under control and set the structure up cleanly. That is what the rules are for, and that is why, for this group, the new biometric exit control is bigger news this year than any Gold Card.

Put this year's developments side by side and a picture emerges that you can describe quite soberly.

The work route is getting more expensive and more selective: see the fee and the salary-weighted selection for the H-1B. The lottery route is getting more formal: see the passport requirement for the lottery. The family route is narrowing: see the end of several reunification programs. And a new route through money is opening.

This is no conspiracy but a preference, and it is stated openly: immigration should benefit the United States economically, measured by skills and capital.

For European entrepreneurs, this direction is mostly favorable, however uncomfortable it can be in individual cases. If you bring capital, skills and a working business, you belong to the group this system prefers.

Just don't make the mistake of reading security into it. Preferences change, and what rests on an order lasts only as long as the order.

Within a few months, an advisory industry springs up around every program like this, and part of it uses methods you should know about.

Warning sign one: guaranteed results. Nobody can guarantee an immigration decision, and anyone who does is selling you confidence, not work.

Warning sign two: success fees tied to the outcome of a government process. Reputable firms rarely do this, because it skews the incentives.

Warning sign three: intermediaries who also sell the product you are meant to invest in. Someone who recommends the route and profits from the destination is not advising you.

And one piece of advice that should be obvious with sums this size and surprisingly often isn't: have the structure reviewed by someone who doesn't profit from it. A second opinion costs a tenth of a percent of the money at stake.

Because a million dollars is a million dollars, however golden the card it ends up on. If you spend it, you should know beforehand that there was no cheaper route for you. In the vast majority of cases that reach us from Europe, there was one, and it cost less than a tenth as much.

I'll come back to where we started, because this number says more than any debate. An agency expecting around 1,600 applications a year is not planning an instrument of immigration policy. It is planning a product for a very small group.

And it estimates the time burden per application at five hours. Five hours for a process with a million dollars riding on it. That may be the most American number in the entire document.

If you want to know which route is genuinely the cheapest and safest for your situation, talk to Mount Bonnell Advisors in Austin, Texas. You'll find an overview of every route in our pillar guide US Visas and Green Cards.

Consultation & implementation

If you'd like to find out what this means for your own situation, the best step is to book a consultation.