--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The United States is obsessed with China, and China is obsessed back. This obsession manifests in really obvious ways. A suspected Chinese surveillance balloon hovering over the northern United States for days, but also less obvious ways. Senate Bill 419 looks to ban the use of TikTok in the state. The China-owned app collects user data that some worry would be shared with the Chinese government. But now it's manifesting in real estate ways. State legislatures across the country are trying to ban Chinese citizens from owning land here. And we have a goal here, and that's to prevent countries that are hostile to the interest of the United States from being able to buy up our farmland or other land that's so important to us. Coming up on Today Explained, how states are targeting Chinese land ownership and whether the Constitution is cool with that kind of thing.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from strawberry.me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job? Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown? Or never wanted in the first place? Sure, you can probably list the reasons for staying. But are they actually just excuses for not leaving? Let a career coach from strawberry.me help you get unstuck. Discover the benefits of having a dedicated career coach in your corner. Go to strawberry.me slash unstuck to claim a special offer.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained, I'm here with Lee Zoe, who reports on politics here at Vox. And Lee, there's been this wave of bills in the United States about who can buy property and where, what is going on?
--:-- Lee Zoe: There's been this push across the country in more than a dozen states to consider legislation that bars people from certain countries from buying land. The legislation SB 264 will prohibit the purchase of farmland in Florida by the CCP and other foreign countries of concern because we believe protecting our food supply is a security issue. So that can include farmland, but that can also include other property like homes. The prohibition in that bill is not just limited to farmland. It also includes land within 10 miles of any military installation or any type of critical infrastructure.
--:-- Lee Zoe: And a big driver behind this is lawmakers are saying they want to restrict where people can buy property because of national security. So fears that, you know, people might be buying farmland, that that could endanger food resources in the country, or that they're buying land really close to sensitive sites like military bases, and that that could produce a national security concern of some kind.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Tell me two things. Who's passing the laws and which countries are involved?
--:-- Lee Zoe: These laws are being heavily driven by Republican legislatures, though they often do have Democratic support as well. And the places where we've seen them gain the most traction are Florida, Montana, and Texas. And the main target of these laws is China and people coming to the U.S. from China. It's a move Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller says is overdue. They really want to be assimilate and be part of the American dream, become a citizen. Until you're a citizen, no, you don't get it. You're a threat to our country. You could be a spy. We don't know.
--:-- Lee Zoe: There are often other countries that are included as well. For example, in the Florida law, you have seven quote unquote countries of concern that the state has highlighted. That's included places like Iran, North Korea, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, countries that the U.S. has historically considered either adversarial or competitors of some kind. But by and large, the harshest restrictions have been on China and on people coming to the U.S. from China, so Chinese immigrants.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A big reason that you hear from legislators is that issue of national security. You know, we've seen over the last couple of years this growing geopolitical tension between the U.S. and China. The spy balloon earlier this year is an obvious example of that. As well as growing economic competition between the two countries. So you just see this hostility increasing and that being a big part of the momentum behind the passage of many of these laws.
--:-- Lee Zoe: So, Lee, obviously with the Chinese spy balloon and various cases in the Department of Justice, we know that the Chinese government spies in the United States. According to neighbors, Ed, as they knew him, was quiet and unassuming. And tonight he's accused of living a double life. One of a Chinese spy. We obviously know the United States spies and the Chinese government. Why this focus on land ownership specifically?
--:-- Lee Zoe: China has increased its purchases of land abroad in the last 10 to 10 years, including in the U.S. And commensurate with that uptick has been this concern about national security that we've already talked about. There's interests either directly tied to the Chinese government or there are businesses and individuals who are able to purchase land. This is Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota, home of some of the nation's most sensitive technology. And this property sits just about 20 minutes down the road. Earlier this year, three North Dakotans who owned parcels here sold this land to a subsidiary of a Chinese company that says it wants to build a corn milling plant.
--:-- Lee Zoe: So it's a combination of those factors. I will say that an important caveat in all of this is that China still owns less than 1% of foreign agricultural land in the U.S. And Canada actually owns the most land in case anyone is curious. But I think one of the concerns that's been expressed related to this law is that instead of having a law that targets the Chinese government narrowly, it is a law that targets people from China broadly.
--:-- Lee Zoe: A bill like this, you are categorizing this whole group as a suspect. Two that have passed are the ones in Florida and Montana. Montana's is more narrowly focused on agriculture. Eric Sommerfeld grows wheat and barley in power just north of Great Falls. He's a big supporter of Montana Senate Bill 203. Letting a foreign adversary have control over our food supply is very dangerous. Florida's is much broader.
--:-- Lee Zoe: So for people from these countries of concern who are not U.S. citizens and who are not lawful permanent residents, they are barred from buying property that's within 10 miles of what's being called a sensitive site. So that often includes a place like a military installation that could include something like critical infrastructure, whether that's a water plant or something of that nature.
--:-- Lee Zoe: The U.S. intelligence community assesses that China almost certainly is capable of launching cyber attacks that could disrupt critical infrastructure services within the United States, including against oil and gas pipelines and rail systems. And then for China specifically, the restriction is actually more draconian. So for people from China who are not U.S. citizens and who are not lawful permanent residents, it bars them from owning any property in Florida. And there is a narrow exception to that, which is for people who are holding non-tourist visas, they are allowed to buy a property that can't be more than two acres and that can't be within five miles of a military installation.
--:-- Lee Zoe: The restrictions could honestly happen anywhere across the state because I think there are more than a dozen military installations in Florida. So if you were to live within five miles of any of those places, that could be considered somewhere you can't buy a home or somewhere you can't buy land. And so that is sort of where we get into this territory of it's effectively preventing people who are immigrants from any of these countries from buying a home or doing something that many immigrants to the U.S. do to gain economic mobility.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Let's like do a scenario here. If you're like a Google employee from China who came to the United States on a work visa and you bought a house near the Miami airport or I don't know, next to some military base or critical infrastructure, what's going to happen to your house under this law?
--:-- Lee Zoe: So people that already own property who might face restrictions under this law will have to register with the state. Oh, a list. Yeah. That never gets us into trouble. We've done it with Iran back a while ago. We did it during World War II with Japanese, which, you know, call what you will, maybe wrong. You're not proposing we go back to the days of internment camps, I hope. No, no, no. Anybody who already owns property is going to basically be forced to register with the government.
--:-- Lee Zoe: The way that they are enforcing this is that there are penalties both for people who try to buy property and penalties for people who sell property. The American Civil Liberties Union says the law will, quote, codify and expand housing discrimination against people of Asian descent in violation of the Constitution and the Fair Housing Act. And I think that's what gets us into like very clear, problematic racial profiling territory because anybody who's selling a home, I doubt that they want to face a misdemeanor charge, which could lead to fines or jail time.
--:-- Lee Zoe: So they're not going to be wanting to sell to people who might be affected by this law because they themselves don't want to face any type of penalty. All totally, how many people might be affected by these laws? So an estimate from 2018 from AAPI data is that there are over 125,000 Chinese American people in Florida, and they might not all be explicitly targeted by these bans. But the concern I've heard from a lot of activists who live there from Chinese community in Florida is that regardless of whether you are a person that this specifically applies to, if you have a name that sounds Chinese, if you look like you're Chinese, any seller is going to be more reluctant to sell you a house or to sell you a property.
--:-- Lee Zoe: Because that's just going to entail a lot more work on their part to double check someone's background or make sure that they're not violating the law and susceptible to the penalties that we've talked about. And that was Florida alone. What about all the other laws in other states? So a lot of these other states, the laws are still in process. Texas actually proposed a very similar law to Florida, but it's been watered down significantly and will probably focus more specifically on farmland and less on homes and property writ large.
--:-- Lee Zoe: And that's because of pushback in the state. We must stand in solidarity to protest these discriminatory bills. We need to stand up, speak out, and fight back. And a lot of other places, I think, are still considering it. A semaphore report had it at over, I think it was 24 states are looking at similar types of legislation that would restrict property in some way. And if it would affect over 100,000 people in Florida, we could assume that we're talking about laws that would affect millions of Chinese nationals living in the United States.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Either Chinese nationals, but also just Chinese American people. I want to be clear, like, this is not a law that's only going to affect the people that the fine print says it affects. It's going to affect anybody that people perceive as having Chinese descent. And that includes Chinese-American people, Chinese-American citizens. It includes Asian-American people who present as Chinese. So it has a very wide-ranging reach beyond just what legally it might say the people it can target.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That was Li Zhou from Vox. Florida law banning Chinese citizens from buying land in certain strategic locations is supposed to go into effect this summer but it already being challenged in court. Last week a group of Chinese citizens living in the United States and the ACLU sued the state arguing its law violates the Constitution. In a minute, that pesky constitutionality question.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram for him. It's Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Chime. Nobody likes fees and complicated banking, says Chime. And Chime gets that, says Chime. Chime is a financial technology company that says they understand that every dollar counts. So when you set up direct deposit through Chime, they say you get access to fee-free features, such as free overdraft coverage, getting paid up to two days early with direct deposit, so much more.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from Macy's. It's almost fall, and that means it's time to cycle your wardrobe to the cold setting. Because while everyone loves a breezy summer outfit, let's be real, layering is even more fun. That's why Macy's Fall Fashion Guide has everything you need to piece together the perfect look for you. It's your one-stop shop for fall's latest trends and must-haves, curated by their experts.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Find the perfect layering pieces for you by exploring the Macy's Fall Fashion Style Guide. Shop in-store or online at macy's.com. You're listening to Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Maybe making some law that bans a specific group from a certain country from doing something sounds familiar to you? It sounded familiar to Julian Kuh, too. He's a law professor at Hofstra Law School in New York.
--:-- Julian Kuh: Yes, you know, the most direct historical precedent for these are what are referred to today as the alien land laws, which are laws that were passed by several states in the western part of the United States in the early 20th century. And these laws essentially banned certain groups of foreign citizens from buying land of any kind in those states.
--:-- Julian Kuh: So those are states like California, Washington State, really only Western states were sort of involved in this movement in the early 20th century. I think they're pretty clearly targeted toward preventing immigrants from China and Japan, initially China, but then later Japan, from being able to acquire land.
--:-- Julian Kuh: The reason why they only impacted China and Japan, though, was because they did not prevent all foreigners from buying land. It only prevented foreigners who were not eligible to become citizens from buying land. And the only group of people initially who were foreigners who were not eligible to become citizens in the United States were Chinese because of the law Congress passed, which said Chinese immigrants are not allowed to immigrate.
--:-- Julian Kuh: If they do, they can't become citizens. On the eve of the greatest wave of immigration in American history, President Chester A. Arthur signed into law an extraordinary piece of federal legislation. It was called the Chinese Exclusion Act, and it was unlike any law enacted since the founding of the republic.
--:-- Julian Kuh: America actually typically welcomed you, and you show up, and you have your land, right? You can just put a little stake down and get your land. So the Chinese Exclusion Law is one of the first really comprehensively restrictive laws. And it's also the first and only time in the entire history of the United States that a group is singled out by name, Chinese, by name, as being undesirable.
--:-- Julian Kuh: And then furthermore, the states went further to try to deter them from coming by preventing them from buying land. So that's, the laws were not phrased explicitly about Chinese immigrants, but they really only applied to Chinese immigrants in the first instance. Later on, there was a similar agreement with Japan that prevented Japanese immigration, so the Japanese fell into the same category.
--:-- Julian Kuh: California was the state that was most concerned about Chinese immigration throughout the 19th century. Those Chinese immigrants came as part of the gold rush. When the gold rush was over and the railway built, the laborers were no longer welcome. And politicians from California were instrumental in getting the United States Congress to ban Chinese immigration in the late 19th century, the Chinese Exclusion Act.
--:-- Julian Kuh: And then California then led the way with other states in trying to deter further Chinese immigration or try to get Chinese people to leave by preventing them from buying land. And so by banning them from buying land, this would discourage them from settling because a lot of the work there in California and Washington was agricultural. But if you can't buy land, you're less likely to immigrate to the United States.
--:-- Julian Kuh: I think that's what was going on with these laws. What effects did they have on these groups, on Chinese immigrants, Japanese immigrants? I think effectively, it really just created a massive deterrence for Chinese people to immigrate to the United States. And I think you can see that in patterns of immigration from China.
--:-- Julian Kuh: So there was a massive wave of immigration from China in the 19th century. I mean if it had been a normal pattern that you see with other countries you see a lot more Chinese immigrants of the fifth sixth generations. But in fact there was a cutoff in the late 19th century really and then immigration did not come back again from China in Asia until the 50s and 60s.
--:-- Julian Kuh: That's why most immigrants from China are, like my family, were immigrants from the 60s, right? There aren't as many Chinese immigrants from those earlier generations in between. And what eventually happened to these laws? So they were challenged in the Supreme Court in the 40s. The court initially signaled it would uphold them and refused to invalidate them.
--:-- Julian Kuh: But then in 1950s, the court kind of moved away from that decision and a signal that they would find it a violation of the Equal Protection Clause because they read the laws as targeting people on the basis of race and national origin, which the court in the 50s interpreted the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment as prohibiting.
--:-- Julian Kuh: And then in 1950s, the Supreme Court of the state of California issued a decision which held that California's alien land law was a violation of the federal constitution, the Equal Protection Clause, because it targeted people in race and national origin. That decision was effectively followed by all the other state courts.
--:-- Julian Kuh: So the U.S. Supreme Court never actually finally ruled on those issues. So once the California Supreme Court issued this decision, And again, California was the most important version of these laws. Once California went that direction, pretty much everyone agreed that this was no longer going to be constitutional. And so they just essentially stopped being enforced.
--:-- Julian Kuh: In fact, they're still on the books, technically speaking. Like the state of Oklahoma still has in their constitution a ban on foreign ownership of land. But it's just not enforced, right? It's sort of like, it's kind of like the marijuana laws. They're still on the books, but no one enforces them. And they haven't been enforced since the early 1950s. So that's why we've just kind of forgotten about them.
--:-- Julian Kuh: So the Supreme Court says that these laws violate the 14th Amendment. Help me understand then how we have new laws that don't feel totally dissimilar. The key thing with these new laws that makes them different is that they don't just target people from China or Japan, which could be considered a racial group. But also, they include, you know, Russia, Cuba, countries which they define as foreign adversaries, United States.
--:-- Julian Kuh: And so, therefore, it's a little bit broader in some ways than the alien land laws. The other thing, though, is that the new laws are justified explicitly on national security grounds in a way that the old laws were not. The old laws didn't really state what their purpose was. These new laws either said this is because of national security, and the new laws, in many cases, like Florida's, says that you can't live within a certain distance of a military base or critical infrastructure.
--:-- Julian Kuh: So that gives those laws, therefore, what we call them in lawyers, more narrow. So that is why they have a better chance of being constitutional than the old alien land laws, which I think they didn't even really try to explain exactly why they needed to have those laws.
--:-- Julian Kuh: The United States obviously isn't the only country that's worried about Chinese land laws. With ascendancy and Chinese power. Are there other countries passing laws like these? Most countries don't phrase it in terms of aiming it at one country. They aim it just toward foreign citizens in general.
--:-- Julian Kuh: Like, I think if Florida had said, we're just going to take this against any foreign citizens, even British people are subject to this, they're actually, in a weird way, they have a better defense because it's not aimed at one group. So most countries have a broader, like any foreigners are subject to the same rules.
--:-- Julian Kuh: Home prices are sky high. With so many Canadians priced out, the federal government is trying to make buying a home more than just a dream. The budget will make it illegal for foreigners to purchase Canadian properties for two years. What's different is America has actually historically been one of the great places because you could just show up from anywhere and buy land.
--:-- Julian Kuh: This is an immigration country. We're a country of immigrants. And I think this is a pretty big departure. Just like the alien land laws, where these laws are a departure from our tradition of anyone who shows up, if they have the money, they can buy land. We welcome them to our community as long as they follow our laws.
--:-- Julian Kuh: And so I think other countries do have this, but this is something that departs from our traditions in America. And I think our reflecting, I think, our justifiable concerns about Chinese espionage, which are real and a real problem. I just don't think banning land purchases is the most reasonable way to deal with Chinese espionage threats.
--:-- Julian Kuh: What's the more reasonable way? Well, first, I think the federal government probably should take the lead rather than the state governments because they have better information. And I think the types of things they're doing generally are good, whether it's spying or whether it's – what often is they're threatening Chinese nationals or Chinese communities in the states. Or, frankly, they're stealing intellectual property.
--:-- Julian Kuh: So those are the types of things you should worry about. I don't think land purchases is the real concern. Now, there might be some, like suppose the Chinese government or Chinese affiliated company buys a port or something like this, the Port of New York. The federal government has the power to block it if it feels like it's a national security threat.
--:-- Julian Kuh: But that would be based on the specific case, the evidence of that company, of whether that thing that they were buying was actually a national security concern or not. We have a whole mechanism to screen out bad things and good things. I think these sorts of blanket bans on Chinese citizens, it's just too broad. It's not effective. It'll create a lot of unhappiness and also a lot of bad will, frankly, and won't actually stop the types of Chinese espionage that we should be worried about.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Julian Ku is a vice dean and professor of law at Hofstra Law out in Long Island, New York. Our program today was produced by Halima Shah, edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and mixed and mastered by Patrick Boyd with a little mini-mix assist from Michael Raphael. This is Today Explained. Thank you.
