TOI correspondent from Washington: Offering sketchy details and dodgy numbers, President Donald Trump has said American companies could invest in students from India and other foreign countries who graduate from US colleges to enable them obtain the proposed “gold cards” so that talent is retained in the US.
A day after he floated the idea of a Gold Card, which he described as a Green Card plus that could lead to American citizenship for foreigners investing $5 million in the US, Trump expanded the idea to include foreign students graduating from US universities, saying under the current system too many of them were forced to return home, particularly to India, to become successful and wealthy there after studying in the US.
“Look, I’ve had the complaints from a lot of companies, where they go out to hire people, and they can’t hire them out of colleges. And you know what they do? They go back to India, or they go back to their country…they open up a company, and they they become billionaires,” Trump said at a cabinet meeting.
He then offered a vague, disjointed idea of companies like Apple going to campuses and spending $5 million to hire five of them, “sort of like paying an athlete a bonus.” It was not clear why the companies would invest $1 million on graduating students (when they are paid below market salaries, according to Trump’s MAGA tech bros) and how this would result in them getting a gold card, which the President earlier said would be sold to foreigners who invest $5 million in the US.
The US President is prone to making fantastic claims and wild projections untethered to reality, and not delivering on many of his promises, notably his pledge to replace Obamacare with a better plan which did not happen in the four years of his first term although he promised it would happen in days. Many of his “Day One’ pledges remain unfulfilled, including deporting millions of illegal immigrants, amid disquiet about slow movement on that front.
In the case of the so-called “Gold Card” too Trump promised it would be introduced in about two weeks, throwing out implausible numbers.
“We’re going to call it the gold card, and I think it’s going to be very treasured. We’re going to start selling hopefully in about two weeks. Now, just so you understand, if we sell a million that’s $5 trillion. If we sell 10 million, which is possible, 10 million highly productive people coming in, or people that we’re going to make productive, they’ll be young, but they’re talented, like a talented athlete. That’s $50 trillion that means our debt is totally paid off, and we have $15 trillion above that,” Trump said.
He briefly expressed some self-doubt, saying “I don’t know that we’re going to sell that many…maybe we won’t sell many at all,” before asserting “but I think we’re going to sell a lot, because I think there really is a thirst. No other country can do this. Because people don’t want to go to other countries. They want to come here. Everybody wants to come here, especially since November 5,” when he was elected.
Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick offered a more sober appraisal, saying there were more than 250,000 investors in line for the EB-5 visa, which requires an investment of about $ 1 million, and even if 200,000 of these chose to apply for the Gold Card, it would generate $1 trillion to pay down the national debt.
Even those numbers look optimistic considering the US currently offers only around 10,000 EB-5 visas annually and in many years even that quota is not filled. But Lutnick said the EB5 program was poorly administered and would be reformed to come up with the Gold Card program soon.