I Sing the New Gate, Gleaming

I’m about to publish a serious post explaining my updated analysis of the EB-5 visa backlog and wait time situation. But while I labor over that presentation, I can’t help a quick reaction to two emails in my inbox today. One from Google Alerts, flagging the latest social media comments about the Trump Gold Card proposal. And another from the Academy of American Poets, saying they’ve been notified by the NEA of a grant terminated because “fostering public interest in poetry no longer aligns with the Administration’s agenda.” Okay then.

I haven’t talked much about the Gold Card proposal because Congress seems disinclined to make it legal. And surely President Trump as a champion of border sovereignty wouldn’t actually finalize an extralegal pathway to admission, with Howard Lutnick and Elon Musk in the role of coyotes, no matter what’s said on X. But I do worry that the ongoing Gold Card talk could tarnish EB-5, which is in the law, not for the ultra-wealthy, and a jobs program not a golden visa program. And being also a fan of American poetry, I enlisted AI to draft a Gold Card comment in the form of an homage to Walt Whitman.

ChatGPT, please write a poem in the style of Walt Whitman for the Trump Gold Card. The Gold Card is a proposed pathway for foreign nationals to gain admission to the United States in exchange for a $5 million cash payment facilitated by Elon Musk and Howard Lutnick. The Gold Card is different from EB-5, a form of legal immigration that does not sell green cards but requires investing in a business that creates jobs.

Certainly. Below is a poem in the style of Walt Whitman, evoking his grand, rolling cadence and expansive vision as it contemplates the Trump Gold Card in contrast to the traditional ideals of American immigration:

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“I Sing the New Gate, Gleaming”

I sing the nation—its cities and vast rivers, its ports and fields,
I sing the immigrant—her hands rough from labor, his eyes bright with the sweat of promise.
But now I behold another vision:
Not Ellis Island’s lantern, not the judge’s oath, nor the slow bloom of lawful toil—
But a card—golden, shining, swift in passage.

Lo! What is this, with luster not from liberty but lucre?
The Trump Gold Card!
Brass-banded invitation to the banquet of the Republic,
Price: five million and no questions asked.

By Elon the celestial dealer of dreams and rockets,
By Lutnick the ledger-bearer of the high towers of finance—
The gate swings open without a line, without the grind,
No job promised, no child lifted, no sweat pressed into concrete.

This is no EB-5, that old contract of hope,
Where green cards grew not from vaults but from vineyards,
From startups in Detroit and factories in Fresno,
From immigrants who gave and gave, and built what they would one day call home.

But the Gold Card?
O America, whose flag once waved to masses yearning to breathe free,
Do you now raise your arms only to the richest stranger?

I see them coming—not with papers or prayers,
But with wire transfers,
With yachts idling in the harbor of justice.

I do not scorn the foreigner, no—
But I lament the barter of dignity,
The bypass of law not for mercy but for millions.

O nation, you who once took pride in the forge,
In the welder —
Will you trade that fire for the glint of bullion?

Yet still I sing, because I must.
For I see too the quiet ones who still arrive by EB-5,
Whose feet kiss our soil
Not as buyers, but as builders.

Let the Gold Card gleam,
But let us ask what is gained—and what is lost—
When a nation sells its doors.