South African-born Elon Musk, who became a US citizen in 2002 after moving to the country seven years prior, says he's "doing a quiet trial" of president Donald Trump's dubious "gold card" immigration program.

The pay-to-enter scheme allows obscenely rich foreign "broligarchs" to fast-track their US residency application by shelling out a whopping $5 million upfront — a program Musk personally could've greatly benefited from.

"We're doing a quiet trial to make sure the system works properly," he tweeted over the weekend. "Once it is fully tested, it will be rolled out to the public with an announcement by the President."

Details surrounding Musk's own immigration journey remain murky to this day. The biographical narrative goes that Musk entered America from Canada on an F-1 student visa when he went to the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1990s before securing an H-1B visa (for temporary foreign workers), followed by his U.S. citizenship in 2002.

Last year, the Washington Post reported that the mercurial CEO may have begun working illegally in the US in the 1990s on a student visa.

He once described his past immigration status as a "gray area," even after his brother Kimball Musk described both himself and Elon as "illegal immigrants."

"As an immigrant to the United States, I am extremely pro-immigrant," he said during a 2023 live stream.

Despite claiming to be pro-immigrant, his stance on immigration has been anything but, as it's frequently rooted in xenophobic rhetoric involving conspiracy theories and unfounded claims. In February, he appeared to endorse the idea of race-based immigration, agreeing with a user on his social media platform that South Africans were "being persecuted for their race in their home country."

Put simply, Trump’s approach of allowing millionaires to apply for residency by spending obscene amounts of cash appears to fall perfectly in line with Musk's agenda.

"You have a green card, this is a gold card," the president boasted to reporters earlier this year. "We’re going to be putting a price on that card of about $5 million and that’s going to give you green card privileges, plus it’s going to be a route to citizenship."

"I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people," he told reporters at the time.

The Trump administration has since maintained that the system the gold card program would replace was "full of nonsense, make-believe, and fraud," according to commerce secretary Howard Lutnick.

In short, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Musk has fully endorsed the idea of letting Russian oligarchs gain US citizenship by paying their way through the system.

After previously decrying the immigration process — which Musk went through (mostly) legally — the billionaire is now yanking up the ladder behind him, making baseless claims about "illegal" immigrants and standing behind an administration violating due process rights by detaining and deporting immigrants (and even US citizens) in growing numbers.

More on immigration: Trump’s Deportation Airline Just Got Hacked by Anonymous


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