President Donald Trump is selling America, literally.
The administration’s latest immigration proposal is something that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick called the “Trump gold card” — a visa for wealthy foreigners willing to spend $5 million for a pathway to U.S. citizenship.
When Trump delivers his first address to Congress on Tuesday night, he will likely frame this idea as a matter of economic pragmatism, although research shows these “golden visa” programs typically contribute no more than 0.3% of the gross domestic product and have a negligible impact on growth.
But it’s more insidious than that. This new proposal is in keeping with Trump’s idea of America as one of exclusion, not inclusion.
At the same time that he wants to sell citizenship to the highest bidders, Trump is seeking to remove people who are already here. In his first term, he separated families of migrants who had crossed the border illegally and sought to ban travelers from six Muslim majority countries. In his second term, he’s outsourced deportations, used Guantánamo Bay as a migrant detention site and sought to make it easier for immigration agents to enter places of worship.
It’s a wholesale rewrite of what it means to be an American.
The “gold card” proposal is the flip side of this dark record. More than just a policy, it’s a wholesale rewrite of what it means to be an American. In Trump’s vision, citizenship is no longer about building a shared national project; it is an asset reserved for those who can afford it, as it is in countries with “golden visa” programs such as Malta and Cyprus. Being American would become a high-end commodity, available only to the wealthy.
The proposal exploits the growing disillusionment of working-class Americans in urban and suburban communities who feel the ground crumbling beneath them. They’ve spent their lives working hard, only to see their jobs shipped overseas and their communities hollowed out. As prices rise and making ends meet becomes harder, opportunity feels like a winner-takes-all scenario. When local programs lose funding, factories shut down and jobs disappear. When communities feel the surge of illegal immigration and see government resources misallocated, resentment festers. And when families who have lived in these neighborhoods for generations struggle while new arrivals seek a better life, frustration turns to division.
But immigrants don’t weaken America, they strengthen it. Families who come here to work, build and contribute are the very people who keep the country’s promise alive.
Democrats, meantime, are failing to meet the moment. It is not enough to call Trump’s immigration policies inhumane. They are that but they are also something more dangerous: a seductive narrative about who deserves to be here and why. And as Trump spins this narrative, Democrats remain unable to articulate a compelling vision of what American citizenship should mean.
Democrats had the chance in 2024, and they blew it. Instead of making a forceful argument for immigration as a system of order, security and national strength, they hedged and waffled. Instead of calling Trump’s bluff — pointing out that his party has no real plan beyond exclusion — they let the debate be defined on his terms because of border influx that the Biden administration failed to address and on out-of-touch ideas that presidential candidates floated in 2020.
America has never been just a marketplace. It has always been a national project of people and heritage — something greater than GDP, something defined not just by who gets in, but also by what those people contribute and how they become part of a shared culture and set of values. That is the difference between citizenship and consumerism, between a nation and a business deal. And it is that idea that Democrats must champion.
The American dream isn’t just an abstraction, it’s what has driven generations to work night shifts, to build something better, to believe in endless possibility.
The American dream isn’t just an abstraction, it’s what has driven generations to work night shifts, to build something better, to believe in endless possibility. And that dream can only survive if America remains a place that rewards effort, not just privilege. That is the vision Democrats need to fight for, not a country where citizenship is auctioned off to the highest bidder, but one where longtime residents and immigrants alike are given a fair shot.
A serious Democratic vision for immigration cannot just respond to Trump’s daily theatrics. It must be a common-sense approach that upholds both security and strength, stops the flow of illegal immigration, fights crime and recognizes immigration as a cornerstone of the American project — not a problem to be managed, not a privilege for the rich, but an opportunity to strengthen the nation. If Democrats fail to make that case, they will once again find themselves on defense against a movement that has already decided what America should be.
Trump’s address should be a warning. His immigration agenda is not just a policy, but it’s also a vision for America’s future. If Democrats do not counter it with one of their own, they will have lost the fight before it even began.
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Rotimi Adeoye
Rotimi Adeoye is a Philadelphia-based columnist and former speechwriter covering immigration, democracy, and American politics.