In the last two months since Trump’s inauguration, we’ve seen a flurry of policies and measures designed to address immigration, the single most important issue of the 2024 election.
We’ve seen the end of birthright citizenship. The beginning of mass-deportation operations, starting with the most dangerous illegal aliens at large in the US. The fortification of the southern border with Mexico, resulting in a 96% decrease in attempted crossings. The use of tariffs — or the mere threat of tariffs — to force neighbouring countries to get serious about preventing the movement of people and illegal substances across their borders into the US. I could continue. (RELATED: ‘President Trump Is Doing A Great Job’ On Immigration, Mexican General Hector Jimenez Baez Says In Rare Interview)
EAGLE PASS, TEXAS – DECEMBER 18: As seen from an aerial view Texas National Guard troops watch over more than 1,000 immigrants who had crossed the Rio Grande overnight from Mexico on December 18, 2023 in Eagle Pass, Texas. A surge as many as 12,000 immigrants per day crossing the U.S. southern border has overwhelmed U.S. immigration authorities in recent weeks. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
Although there are still issues that need to be resolved, like ensuring the manpower and detention capacity to allow millions or even tens of millions of illegals to be apprehended and deported, it’s clear that Trump really is serious about fulfilling his promises to the American people.
Patriots should be grateful, and also indulgent. Give Trump the time he needs to sort this terrible mess out. Nothing like this has ever been done before. (RELATED: ‘Meteoric Rise’: How A Fishing Trip And A Phone Call Made Tom Homan ‘Border Czar’)
But there have been a few missteps. One of them is Trump’s new gold-visa scheme, announced a few weeks ago, which is unlikely to raise much money and, perhaps worse, sends out the wrong message about what it really means to be an American.
Make America Great Again, if it is about anything, is about the realness of being an American. The quiddity of Americanness, you might say. Or, to put it more simply, rejecting the globalist conception of nationhood and national identity — that they don’t really exist and never have done — and saying: America exists and it’s not for sale.
The new scheme would allow non-citizens to buy permanent US residency, and with it a path to citizenship, for $5 million, and is being hailed as a way for the government to eat into the ever-growing national debt, which currently stands at $36 trillion and counting.
The gold visas will replace the EB-5 immigrant investor visa, which offers permanent residency in exchange for investments in job creation worth at least $1 million.
“I think it’s going to be very treasured,” the President said of the new scheme at the end of last month. “I think it’s going to do very well.”
Trump suggested the new scheme could raise trillions.
“We’ll be able to sell maybe a million of these cards, maybe more than that. And if you add up the numbers, they’re pretty good. As an example, a million cards could be worth $5 trillion.”
This isn’t a new idea. Nations around the globe offer pay-for-residency and pay-for citizenship schemes. A number of European nations decided, in the face of the economic downturn after the 2008 Financial Crisis, to offer such schemes: Spain, Greece, Hungary, and Portugal among them.
A Spanish gold visa, for example, is granted for a 500,000 euro investment in real estate. In Greece and Hungary, the threshold is half that: 250,000 euros. In Portugal, there are two options: either a 250,000 euro donation for the restoration of a national monument or a 500,000 euro property investment.
Such schemes don’t bring in a great deal of money. Typically, it’s reckoned around 0.3% of GDP. If that’s the case with Trump’s own scheme — well, that won’t even leave a scratch on the $36 trillion national debt.
Recent polling from Forbes suggests the wealthiest individuals see no need to buy American residency or citizenship. Eighteen billionaires were asked if they would buy an American gold visa. Thirteen said they had no interest at all: they simply didn’t think they’d need it.
“I don’t have to come to the United States to invest in the United States,” a Canadian billionaire said.
While Trump has promised gold-visa holders will not be subject to US tax on their overseas income — nobody would come if they were — it’s still not clear how the scheme will really work, which of course makes it less attractive. A US passport isn’t even the most desirable. That accolade goes to a passport from the UAE, which allows visa-free entry to 179 countries worldwide.
At this stage, the return on investment on a Trump gold visa simply isn’t clear.
But there’s a more fundamental problem with the scheme, I think: it sends the wrong message about the nature of American citizenship in the second Trump age.
Selling residency, and with it the possibility of future citizenship, goes against the core tenets of the entire populist movement of Make America Great Again.
Vice President JD Vance, more than President Trump, has made it clear that America is more than simply an “idea,” as some conservatives, no less than liberals, like to claim. Rather, America is a people and a place. This runs directly counter to the globalist vision of America and the world, and to all the academic cant peddled in the universities and institutions of learning and all the woke sloganeering forced down American’s throats — not least of all “diversity is our strength.”
Even without any explicit invocation of blood and soil, MAGA is clearly about reclaiming and preserving the distinctness of a distinct people and a distinct place against the powerful people and interests that want to enrich themselves by destroying it.
What a shame to dilute or even sacrifice that vital, winning message for a scheme that won’t even do what it’s supposed to do — which is raise money — anyway.
Raw Egg Nationalist is the pen name of Dr. Charles Cornish-Dale, an Oxford- and Cambridge-educated medieval historian and anthropologist. He is the author of the ‘Raw Egg Nationalism Cookbook,’ ‘The Eggs Benedict Option,’ and the editor of MAN’S WORLD.
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