$5m US golden visa may be out of reach for some Arabs

• New US $5m ‘gold card’ scheme
• Capital flow restrictions
• Indians and Chinese may benefit

People born in Egypt and Morocco may find it more difficult than those born in Saudi Arabia or the UAE to secure President Trump’s $5 million “gold card” US permanent residency because of restrictions on capital flows.

The Gulf and wider Mena region punch above their weight globally when it comes to the number of applicants for the US’s existing 35-year-old, EB-5 investor residency programme.

More than 135,500 foreign investors and close relatives have secured US permanent residency through the EB-5 visa program since 2000, according to State Department data crunched by IIUSA, a trade association that represents certain EB-5 stakeholders. 

Under the EB-5 system, foreign investors receive green cards by pledging significant capital to American businesses that create or preserve jobs. At present the minimum spend is $900,000.

In contrast, the new gold card would allow investors to secure permanent residency – and eventually citizenship – simply by paying the designated fee of $5 million.

This price tag could, however, limit applicants from countries that make it harder to transfer such sums abroad, says Mark Davies, global managing partner of immigration-focused law firm Davies and Associates.

“Clients with funds in Egypt and Morocco really struggle to get sufficient capital out of the country in a lawful way,” Davies tells AGBI.

Egypt-born applicants secured the 13th highest number of so-called “unreserved” EB-5s in the first three months of the US fiscal year, which started in October. That ranking could change with the new programme and for another reason.

The new programme is not likely to be subject to any cap on the number of people able to apply from any given country, as is the case with the EB-5 programme.

“That helps people from India and China, not from the Mena region,” Davies says.

Although Egypt, for instance, is the most populous Arab state with more than 100 million people, China and India combined dwarf it with some 3 billion people between them.

Unreserved EB-5s do not limit investments to high-priority sectors and regions and take longer to obtain. That is opposed to reserved EB-5s, which direct flows to rural areas, regions of high unemployment and infrastructure projects. 

Saudi Arabia by contrast is the 48th biggest country by population. However, it produced 14 “unreserved” EB-5 visa recipients, or the 15th largest number by country of birth, in the first three months of this US fiscal year.

That is already more than the 12 Saudi-born applicants in all of the fiscal year 2024, and on track to overtake a record of 43 in 2019, the year before the Covid-19 pandemic.

The UAE, the 86th country in the world by population, had four unreserved EB-5 issuances from October to December this fiscal year, or the 37th highest number by country of birth. 

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Turkey, with the 18th largest population in the world, had the ninth most unreserved EB-5s issued by country of birth in the first quarter of the financial year 2025.

Gulf capitals like Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Doha, Muscat and Manama are active diplomatic posts for EB-5 issuances, according to the IIUSA database, as they also serve a large population of wealthy expatriates, including Indians and Pakistanis.

While the overall visa recipient figures are small, the financial commitments involved make this programme – aimed at bringing the world’s wealthiest people to the United States – high-profile.

Trump officials have not yet provided many details about how the new “gold card” scheme will work, but they have hinted at a more streamlined mechanism with fewer guardrails.