DATELINE — CLAYBORN COUNTY, IA — Dale Meinhardt, 68, who last spring sold four hundred and twelve acres of his late father’s corn ground to a Minneapolis solar outfit for a number he will only describe as “comfortable,” learned Tuesday morning at the Koffee Kup that the President of the United States is now offering permanent residency to any foreign national willing to pay five million dollars, and laughed so hard he had to set down his mug.
The program, announced by the White House late last week and branded the “Gold Card,” is pitched as a premium replacement for the existing investor visa, with the proceeds flowing into the federal treasury. In Clayborn County, where the median home still clears at $187,000 on a good week and the Casey’s is considered a destination restaurant, the announcement landed less as policy than as a kind of parlor game, conducted Tuesday at Booth 4 over a basket of rye toast.
“The question we were working on,” said Dale, wiping his eyes, “is whether anyone in the county could actually swing it, and the answer we kept arriving at is me, and I’m from Spillville.”
The table, which also included retired ag-lender Curt Vlasak and a rotating cast of men who declined to be named on the grounds that their wives read the paper, spent roughly forty minutes Tuesday morning attempting to identify any second candidate. They considered Phil Roeder, who owns the Ford dealership; Marge Enright, whose husband left her the Casey’s land on Highway 9; and the orthodontist in Decorah whose name nobody could remember. All three were ruled out on liquidity grounds.
“People hear ‘five million’ and they think of a number,” said Rex Halverson, a certified public accountant who has done tax work in the county since 1991 and who was consulted by phone. “But five million in actual cash, sitting there, ready to be handed to the Treasury Department in exchange for a piece of plastic — that’s a different animal. That’s not a farmer. That’s not even most doctors. That’s a man who sold something he didn’t want anymore to a company from somewhere else.”
Halverson estimated that “between four and seven” Clayborn County residents could theoretically produce the sum without liquidating a house, and that all of them are, to his knowledge, United States citizens who have been so for several decades.
Mrs. Peterson, reached at the library where she was reshelving large-print westerns, said she had read about the program in the Tuesday paper and had a question, which was whether the five million dollars came with anything besides the visa. Informed that it did not — that the card is essentially the green card, only more expensive and gold-colored — she nodded once and said, “Well, that’s a lot for a card.”
County Supervisor Denny Krauskopf, asked whether Clayborn County was prepared to welcome any Gold Card recipients who might choose to settle here, said the county “would of course welcome anyone who wanted to contribute to the tax base,” then paused and added that he was not aware of any amenity currently offered by the county that would justify the outlay. Pressed for specifics, he mentioned the new splash pad in Elkader and the fact that the DMV is open Thursdays until six.
At Booth 4, the conversation eventually turned to what Dale would do if a foreign billionaire did, hypothetically, relocate to Spillville under the new program. Dale said he would probably invite him over for a pork loin and then try to sell him the twelve acres of bottom ground he still owns down by the creek, which floods.
“He’d pay five million for a card,” Dale reasoned, “so I figure the floodplain’s at least six hundred.”
Curt Vlasak, who spent thirty-one years approving and denying farm loans in a building that still has a hitching post out front, offered what may have been the morning’s closing thesis. He said he had lent money to men who fixed tractors with baling wire, to women who ran whole operations out of a kitchen ledger, and to one gentleman in 1994 who tried to pay off a note in feeder pigs, and that in none of those cases had the federal government ever suggested any of them were insufficiently American.
“Now apparently you can just buy it,” Curt said. “I’d like to see the closing documents.”
Waitress Bobbi Jo Menke, refilling coffee for the fourth time, was asked whether the Gold Card had come up at any of her other tables Tuesday morning. She said it had not, because most of her other tables were the feed-store crowd, and they were still working through the price of urea.