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New efforts to ban Chinese nationals and others from owning property in Texas and other states echo the treatment of Asians in the US more 100 years ago, when Congress banned them from naturalization and many state laws restrict land ownership.
- In Virginia, Governor Glenn Youngkin is expected to sign legislation barring citizens of countries the State Department designates as “foreign adversaries” from own agricultural land. Companies with deep ties to those countries will also be affected. Those countries now include China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. There are similar proposals in Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota. Foreign owners control part of the farmland of the United Statesaccording to the Congressional Research Service.
- In Texas, many broader proposal names those countries and forbids their citizens from owning any land. The ban would probably extend to legal immigrants living in the US. That bill is still passing the legislature but has the backing of Governor Greg Abbott.
In particular, the Texas proposal recalls a despicable chapter in American history, when the so-called Alien Land Laws were passed in many states between the 1880s and 1920s to ban Asians own land. California’s Alien Land Law Has Finally Been overthrown by the Supreme Court in 1952 for violating the 14th Amendment.
The Chinese have been explicitly barred from immigrating to the United States for generations – from the 1880s, when Congress passed the China Exclusion Act, until that law was repealed during World War II.
So very few Chinese are allowed to immigrate for another generation after that until 1965 – 105 per year – that led to a de facto ban.
As a result, anti-Asian property laws primarily affect Japanese-Americans.
While the laws do not specifically exclude Asians, they do apply to those who are “not eligible for citizenship.”
That created the laws applied specifically to Asians since Congress at the time only allowed citizenship to immigrants from Europe or Africa.
The most notorious example of Alien Land Laws is in California, which has passed multiple versions of these laws over the years and is home to a large concentration of Asian immigrants.
A famous and years-long court battle was pitted against a Japanese immigrant, Jukichi Harada, who found a way around the law by letting his children own the house where his family lived. live in Riverside, California. They were finally able to keep the house when a judge ruled in their favor in 1918, but they it’s late moved to internment camps during World War II because their ancestors were Japanese.
Nice weather House of Harada is a national historic site and a museum.
I called Madeline Hsu, a history professor and expert on Asian American studies at the University of Texas at Austin, to ask if these new proposals were an example of history repeating itself. .
“It’s definitely a kind of reproduction of what people in Asian-American studies call instilling fear of the ‘Yellow Danger,'” she said.
“There are many ways that it resonates with what happened to Japanese Americans during World War II, where regardless of nationality, regardless of origin, they classified by race as alien enemies.
Hsu show me one Posted in Southern History Magazine by Professor Brent Campney of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley documents fears of a Japanese “invasion” in the Rio Grande Valley over 100 years ago.
Campney’s larger argument in studying the treatment of Asian Americans, in this case Japanese, is that local discrimination in Texas and California has reverberated into growing hostility. between Japan and the United States leading up to World War II.
Decades before the U.S. government robbed Japanese Americans of their rights and imprisoned them in camps, Campney wrote, “white Americans called for the same exclusionary stereotypes and impulses to be used against the Japanese during the internship, exacerbating tensions between Japan and the United States.”
It’s a history lesson everyone wants to learn as tensions between the US and China grow. The US Army is maneuver with allies to control China in the Pacific Ocean. The US government is focusing on making the economy more independent from China’s manufacturing industry. There is even talk about ban TikTokThe app is popular with young people in the US and is owned by a private Chinese company.
These efforts to counter a government infiltration into the territory are more problematic as they appear to target many Chinese and ethnic Chinese living in the United States.
“Targeting people by nationality is also a problem,” said Hsu speak. “It is not a good way to identify people who pose a threat to national security or those who are acting on behalf of a foreign government.”
She drew correlations between these new state proposals and previous ones. President Donald Trump promises enforce a ban on Muslims coming to the US. To get a plan through the Supreme Court, he instead banned travel for a time from several countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and South America.
Similarly, the Texas bill also targets specific countries and generalizes that all citizens of those countries pose a threat.
“The only thing it does is it shows these kinds of suspicions and hostility towards these countries,” Hsu said.
