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 tonight, 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.
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.
Read Rotimi Adeoye's full column here. And don't forget to follow MSNBC's live blog coverage of Trump's joint address to Congress.
