Explained: Why US states want to bar Chinese companies, citizens from buying land

From Virginia to Texas, US states are moving to restrict Chinese companies and citizens from purchasing land. This comes amid rising tensions between China and America after a spy balloon was shot down. Let’s take a closer look: What happened? Virginia is poised to pass two bills backed by its Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin including one that bars foreign adversaries including China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba from buying agricultural land, as per DCNewsNow.com. The bill’s sponsor told the website the bill looks at those countries with a “long-standing pattern of adverse activity” towards the United States. The bill would apply retroactively to deals made from 1 January, 2023. This comes after Youngkin in January announced that he intervened in an effort by Virginia to land a Ford Motor Co. battery plant Youngkin objected to the role of a Chinese company in the joint venture, which he has characterised as a “front” for the Chinese Communist Party that would raise national security concerns. The prospective $3.5 billion project was a partnership between Ford and Fujian-based Contemporary, as per SCMP. Youngkin, who has sought to get tough on China recently, has pinned as his tweet: “‘Made in Virginia’ cannot be a front for the Chinese Communist Party. Virginians, not the CCP, should own the rich and vibrant agricultural lands God has blessed us with.” The disclosure by Youngkin — who is widely seen as a possible 2024 presidential contender — has largely split along partisan lines. Democrats have accused him of putting his political ambitions ahead of a chance to secure a major job-creation project, while Republicans have largely been supportive and say the site has been preserved for a better-suited project. All eyes are on Texas, which is considering barring Chinese citizens from buying property on national security grounds. With 28.8 million citizens, Texas is the second most populous state. Of its residents, 1.4 million define their ethnicity as Asian, and 223,500 say they are of Chinese origin, US census data shows.

Houston, the fourth largest US city, has 156,000 residents who identify as Asian.

They include US citizens with Asian heritage but also Chinese permanent residents – or green card holders – who are not naturalized citizens. Texas, which may be a bellwether for other states, banned infrastructure projects with those directly tied to China after a billionaire bought 130,000 acres of Texas land, some of it near a US Air Force base, according to The New York Times. Though the Texas proposal would bar Russians, Iranians and North Koreans from owning real estate, the principal target appears to be Chinese nationals. Around 150,000 foreign-born Chinese are living in Texas, as per The New York Times. The draft proposal was offered up in November 2022 by Republican Lois Kolkhorst, a state senator in Texas in the southern US. “One of the top concerns for many Texans is national security and the growing ownership of Texas land by certain adversarial foreign entities,” Kolkhorst has said. Kolkhorst, who proposed the Texas legislation, said the spark behind the bill was the purchase of 130,000 acres by a retired Chinese army officer linked to the Communist Party. The land is near Laughlin Air Force Base east of Del Rio, a city near the border with Mexico. Sun Guangxin, the real estate tycoon who was the buyer, said he wanted to build a wind and solar farm, but Texas in 2021 blocked the project. The state legislature, citing national security concerns, passed a law that barred any project linked to the governments of China or the other three nations from connecting to the grid. Governor Greg Abbott, a fellow Republican and fierce advocate of more severe immigration policies, says he will sign and enact the proposal if it passes the state senate. I will sign it,” Abbott tweeted. A per The New York Times, even liberal California is getting in on the act. Last year, both Democratically controlled state Houses passed a bill barring foreign ownership of farmland. The bill sponsor,  Senator Melissa Hurtado questioned the motivation behind buying up all the farmland and added “something doesn’t smell right.” In Utah, concern has centered on a Chinese company’s purchase of a speedway near an army depot in 2015 and Chinese-owned farms exporting alfalfa and hay from drought-stricken parts of the state. Is it really a problem? Let’s take a look at the facts. Limitations on foreign individuals or entities owning farmland vary widely throughout the US. While most states allow it, 14 have restrictions. No states have a total prohibition. Of the five states where the federal agriculture department says entities with ties to China own the most farmland, four don’t limit foreign ownership: North Carolina, Virginia, Texas and Utah. The fifth, Missouri, has a cap on foreign land ownership that state lawmakers want to make more stringent. Foreign entities and individuals control less than three percent of US farmland, according to the US Department of Agriculture. DC News Now quoted the US Agriculture Department as saying China holds 383,935 acres of total foreign-owned US agricultural land – that amounts to just one per cent of total foreign farmland.

Canada, meanwhile, holds more than 30 per cent of foreign farmland.

According to the National Association of Realtors, in the 12 months until March 2022, Chinese investment represented six percent of foreign residential purchases in the United States. What do experts say? But experts say China is getting to be an issue on both sides of the aisle. “It doesn’t matter who’s in office … anti-China is a real bipartisan issue, one of the few,” Leo Yu, a law professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, told SCMP. “I really don’t see a way out. It’s just getting worse.” Critics see it as anti-foreigner hysteria, with Texas’ Asian American community particularly concerned about the effect on immigrants who want to buy homes and build businesses. Others say ethnic Chinese are simply the target of discrimination du jour. “Through the years I have helped a lot of Chinese immigrants purchase their homes in Houston, and a lot of them had been working toward their citizenship for years,” Kevin Yu, a green card holder and a real estate agent in Houston, told The New York Times. “These people can be engineers, medical doctors, accountants and teachers.” The proposed bill in Texas, he said, would “take American dreams away from these people, including my family.” “All these people are paying taxes here,” said Ling Luo, a first-generation Chinese immigrant who is director of the Asian Americans Leadership Council. “(They) are paying a tremendous contribution to the universities, to education.” “Our country goes through these waves of finding immigrant groups… to demonize,” said Gene Wu, a member of the Texas House of Representatives. He noted that “China is Texas’s second largest trading partner. And China is the third largest purchaser of Texas goods.” Wu said that law “made sense,” but the new proposal affects a broad class of people and the ends don’t justify the means.

A proposal like the one on the table, he said, “could jeopardise all of those contracts.”

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“Our family didn’t just come from China, we fled from China,” Wu said. “My family went through the Cultural Revolution and all that stuff,” he added, referring to the 1966-1976 period of upheaval as communist leader Mao Zedong sought to purge all rivals. Senator Kolkhorst said that her proposed bans would not affect people with US citizenship or permanent resident status nor anyone “fleeing the tyranny” in their homelands. For Luo, though, such statements are not convincing – even to US citizens like herself. “Who knows if you’re a citizen or you aren’t a citizen? It’s not written on your face. Your Chinese face is what makes people come and abuse us, hate us, to beat us up,” she said. There could also be a host of legal issues. “The discriminatory bill would prohibit members of our communities from participating in the Texas economy, including dual citizens and legal permanent residents, such as green card holders,” David Donatti, a lawyer with the ACLU of Texas, told The New York Times. “Such a bill would raise a host of constitutional issues,” Stephen I Vladeck, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas told the newspaper. “Because the measure does not distinguish between targeting people who are already here and those outside the United States, he said, it raises “serious due process and equal protection issues.” With inputs from agencies Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.