Trump launches gold card for citizenship. And visas become more expensive

"So you will no longer put trainees on an H-1B visa," Lutnick said in a meeting with reporters. "It is no longer economically viable. If you train people, you train Americans.... If you have a very experienced engineer and you want to hire him ... then you can pay $100,000 a year for the H-1B visa."

Trump also announced that he will start selling a 'gold card' visa with a potential path to US citizenship. The 'Trump Gold Card' will be available for a processing fee and a contribution of $1 million after verification. For companies, it will cost $2 million. The 'Trump Platinum Card', on the other hand, will be available for a $5 million contribution and will allow foreigners to spend up to 270 days in the US without being subject to US taxes on non-US income. Trump announced a $5 million gold card in February to replace an existing investor visa: it is now called a platinum card. Applicants can now join a waiting list for the platinum card, but it still needs to be approved by Congress.

First lady Melania Trump, formerly Melania Knauss, obtained an H-1B work visa in October 1996 to work as a model. She was born in Slovenia. The H-1B programme was created in 1990 for people with a bachelor's degree or higher in fields where jobs are considered difficult to fill, particularly science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Critics argue that they allow companies to pay lower wages with fewer job protections.

Historically, these visas - 85,000 per year - have been allocated through a lottery system. This year, Amazon was by far the largest recipient of H-1B visas with over 10,000 awarded, followed by Tata Consultancy, Microsoft, Apple and Google. Geographically, California has the highest number of H-1B workers, according to the Ucis (the Federal Immigration and Citizenship Service).

Critics claim that H-1B positions often go to entry-level positions, rather than senior positions with specific skill requirements. And although the programme is not intended to reduce US wages or replace US workers, critics argue that companies may pay less by placing positions at lower skill levels, even if the specific workers hired have more experience. As a result, many US companies find it cheaper to simply outsource help desk, programming and other basic tasks to consulting firms such as Wipro, Infosys, HCL Technologies and Tata in India and Ibm and Cognizant in the US. These consultancy companies hire foreign workers, often from India, and outsource them to US employers seeking to save money.

Doug Rand, who served as the director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services during the Biden administration, said this amounts to a 'double-personality disorder' for the programme, with only about half of the visas issued each year going to traditional companies that offer long-term employment and can initiate immigrants into citizenship. The other half goes to consulting or recruitment firms and, although many are established and well-known companies, others are run by one person who would not exist without the H-1B programme.

"They are basically participating in the lottery in order to be able to hire staff that they then rent out to other larger companies that do real work," Rand said. "And so there is a lot of misconduct and cheating in this part of the system."

In 2024, visa lottery bids fell by almost 40 per cent, which, according to the authorities, was due to success against people who 'game the system' by submitting multiple, sometimes dubious applications to unfairly increase their chances of being selected.

Major technology companies using H-1B visas demanded changes after massive increases in offers reduced their employees' and potential hires' chances of winning the lottery. Faced with what it recognised as likely fraud and abuse, Uscis said this year that every employee had only one chance to win the lottery, regardless of whether they received one or 50 job offers.

According to analysts, there is still much to be done. The Afl-Cio (a federation of American trade unions) wrote last year that although the changes to the lottery 'include some steps in the right direction', they were not enough to achieve the necessary reforms. The union association wants visas to be awarded to companies that pay the highest wages, rather than by random lottery, a change Trump sought during his first term in the White House.

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