Today, Explained - Real Housebans of Tallahassee

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

A new Florida law will restrict where Chinese citizens can buy homes, and other states may follow suit. The legislation is eerily similar to racist land laws from over 100 years ago. Vox reporter Li Zhou and Hofstra law professor Julian Ku explain. This episode was produced by Haleema Shah, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd with help from Michael Raphael, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 interests 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. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications.

Or how about more ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs. And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. Today Explained, Sean Ramos from here with Leigh Zhou, who reports on politics here at Vox. And Leigh, there's been this wave of bills in the United States about who can buy property and where. What is going on? 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. 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. Tell me two things. Who's passing the laws and which countries are involved? 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.

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. And I feel like I don't need to ask, but I'm going to ask anyway. Why China? 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. So, Lee, obviously with the, you know, 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? China has increased its purchases of land abroad in the last 10 to 15 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 interest 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. 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-owned agricultural land in the U.S. And Canada actually owns the most land, in case anyone is curious. I don't trust those people.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. So let's 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? Anything? So people that already own property who might face restrictions under this law will have to register with the state. Oh, a list. 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 it what you will. Maybe you're 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. 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. 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 told, 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 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. 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, 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. Yes. 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. That was Li Zhou from Vox. Florida's law banning Chinese citizens from buying land in certain strategic locations is supposed to go into effect this summer, but it's 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. I'm Sean Ramos for them. It's Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames.

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to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. 你正在听今天解释。 You're listening to Today Explained. 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 Koo, too. He's a law professor at Hofstra Law School in New York. Yes, 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. 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. Well, the Indian land law affected us because my dad was not able to increase his holdings. Now that he's made a few dollars,

he wants to expand, and it's impossible to expand. 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, and 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. 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. And then furthermore, the states went further to try to deter them from coming by preventing them from buying land. So the laws were not phrased explicitly about Chinese immigrants, but they really only applied to Chinese immigrants in the first instance.

Later on, there's a similar agreement with Japan that prevented Japanese immigration, so the Japanese fell into the same category. 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. 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. 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. So there's 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's a cutoff in the late 19th century, really, and then immigration did not come back again from China and Asia until the 50s and 60s. 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. But then in 1950s, the court kind of moved away from that decision and signaled 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. 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. 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. 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. Really? But it's just not enforced, right? 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.

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 Russia, Cuba, countries which they define as foreign adversaries, United States. 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. So that gives those laws, therefore, what we call them 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. The United States obviously isn't the only country that's worried about Chinese 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. 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. 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 can just show up from anywhere and buy land. 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. 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, what I think are 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. What's the more reasonable way to deal with Chinese espionage threats. 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's often is they're threatening Chinese nationals or Chinese communities in the states. Or frankly, they're stealing intellectual property. 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. But that will 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 is 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. Julian Koo 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. Explain. you