Texas is considering barring Chinese citizens from buying property, citing national security grounds, and other US states might follow suit as tensions with Beijing rise.
Texas’ proposal would also bar Russians, Iranians and North Koreans from owning real estate, but the principal target appears to be Chinese nationals.
The draft proposal was introduced by Texas Senator Lois Kolkhorst in November last year.
Photo: AP
“One of the top concerns for many Texans is national security and the growing ownership of Texas land by certain adversarial foreign entities,” Kolkhorst said.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a fierce advocate of more severe immigration policies, said he would sign and enact the proposal if it passes the Texas Senate.
Foreign ownership of farmland and other real estate, particularly by Chinese citizens or businesses, is becoming a hot issue in the US, and not only in Texas. Florida, Arkansas, South Dakota and eight other states are considering legislation to restrict foreign ownership.
Photo: AFP
However, Texas might be a bellwether. With 28.8 million residents, 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 showed.
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 US citizens.
“All these people are paying taxes here,” said Asian Americans Leadership Council director Ling Luo, a first-generation Chinese immigrant. “[They] are paying a tremendous contribution to the universities, to education.”
Even though the proposal also targets other nationalities, Luo said Chinese are most numerous.
Others say ethnic Chinese have simply become the main target of discrimination in the US.
“Our country goes through these waves of finding immigrant groups ... to demonize,” Texas Representative Gene Wu (吳元之) said. “China is Texas’ second-largest trading partner. And China is the third-largest purchaser of Texas goods.”
A proposal like the one on the table “could jeopardize all of those contracts,” he added.
Increased diplomatic tensions after the US shot down an alleged Chinese surveillance balloon on Saturday last week might boost efforts to restrict foreign real-estate ownership, Wu said.
“There’s some people who are using the rise in tensions as an excuse to come after community members,” Wu said. “There is a difference between people with Chinese heritage and the government of China.”
Kolkhorst said that the spark behind the bill was the purchase of 52,600 hectares of farmland by Sun Guangxin (孫廣信), a retired Chinese military officer with links to the Chinese Communist Party.
The land is near Laughlin Air Force Base east of Del Rio, a city near the border with Mexico.
Sun said that he wanted to build a wind and solar farm, but state authorities 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.
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