Instead, she was worried that her Chinese clients would soon face new hurdles to buying property in the United States. If the deals weren’t closed quickly, she warned them, they may need to consult an attorney before moving forward.
Over the last few months, Montana, Virginia, and North Dakota have all passed legislation restricting the ability of Chinese nationals to buy property. Georgia, Iowa and Kansas, among others, are considering similar legislation.
In Florida, which has passed one of the strictest versions of the law, Chinese nationals can’t buy property within 10 miles of any military bases — the state has 21 of them — or critical infrastructure such as airports. Under the law, which is being challenged in court, those who sell property to Chinese immigrants could face stiff penalties, including a $1,000 fine and up to one year in prison.
Supporters of these restrictions say they are necessary to protect the country, many citing the launch of a spy balloon from China earlier this year. And recently, President Biden signed an executive order aimed at curbing the flow of U.S. investment into a limited range of Chinese firms.
“Florida is taking action to stand against the United States’ greatest geopolitical threat — the Chinese Communist Party,” Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said in a statement when the bill was signed on May 8.
Asked about the concerns among some people in the Asian community, Jeremy Redfern, the governor’s spokesman, didn’t directly respond, writing in an email, “There is no reasonable way of responding to unnamed ‘Asian Americans in Florida.’”
In some cases, similar but less harsh restrictions apply to people whose permanent home is in Cuba, Venezuela or other “countries of concern.”
Supporters of such measures say their concerns started in North Dakota when a Chinese-owned company proposed opening a corn mill processing plant in 2022. The U.S. Air Force suggested the project’s location 12 miles from Grand Forks Air Force Base made it a threat to national security and the local city council ultimately voted down the project.
But for some Chinese nationals and Chinese Americans the new laws have been a hurtful reminder of anti-Asian laws that banned them from immigrating to the United States or buying agriculture property in the country for decades.
“This is not right, we live in the 21st Century,” said Winnie Tang, who moved to the United States from China 45 years ago and lives in Miami. The laws, she says, remind her of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 — a 10-year ban on Chinese laborers immigrating to the United States. “We are being singled out to be discriminated against by other people.”
The Florida laws bans people “domiciled” in China who don’t have U.S. citizenship or permanent residency from owning property in Florida.
The law doesn’t apply to her, Tang acknowledges, since she is a U.S. citizen. But it could still impact anyone Asian, she said.
“My face is Chinese,” Tang said. “So that means in the future, if I want to buy any property they could use this law to force me to show ID to prove I’m a citizen and not related to the Chinese government … This law gives people the right to discriminate against me openly.”
Critics have called such laws discriminatory and the Department of Justice has said about the Florida version of the law: “These unlawful provisions will cause serious harm to people simply because of their national origin, contravene federal civil rights laws, undermine constitutional rights, and will not advance the State’s purported goal of increasing public safety.”
Chinese Embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu said in a statement in response to the law: “China-US economic and trade cooperation is mutually beneficial and win-win in nature. Overstretching the concept of national security and politicizing economic, trade and investment issues runs counter to the principles of market economy and international trade rules, in addition to undercutting international confidence in the US market environment. The relevant restrictions will also further fuel Asian hatred in the U.S., intensify racial discrimination, and seriously undermine the values that the U.S. claims to hold.”
Florida state Rep. Katherine Waldron (D), who co-sponsored the bill, defended the law, saying that it’s “certainly not” discriminatory. Every buyer, no matter their race, will have to verify they aren’t a member of the Chinese Communist Party or a foreign entity, she said.
“It doesn’t really discriminate because it will be one of the many documents that people sign when they close on a property here in Florida,” Waldron said.
She said that she had experience dealing with the Chinese government in business situations. “So I kind of had a taste of some of their tactics and their strategies and stuff like that. And I just thought it would be good thing for us to do,” Waldron said.
Legislation in Texas, which aimed to ban all property ownership by Chinese citizens, died in the House of Representatives after massive protest from the Asian American community. “I don’t think the Republicans fully appreciated was how unbelievably angry the Asian community was,” Democratic state Rep. Gene Wu, who represents a heavily Chinese district in Houston, said.
Florida has pushed back against criticism of the law, saying in a July legal filing responding to a bid to secure an injunction against the law that: “The land-ownership provisions of SB 264 are rational. They are consistent with the long tradition in this country of restricting alien land ownership, rooted in concerns for public safety and state security.” (A judge rejected the injunction motion on Thursday; the case itself has yet to reach court.)
But that isn’t enough for some Asian Americans, who say they have experienced more hate crimes since the pandemic began.
“This has always been the singular, major discrimination against all Asian Americans,” Wu said. “That Asian Americans are never truly American enough, that Asian Americans are always just a hair’s breadth away from betraying the country and doing whatever their home country tells them to.”
The United States has taken drastic measures against Asian Americans before, said Mae Ngai, a professor of Asian American studies at Columbia University, noting that during World War II, more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent were forced into camps after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
“This is where it leads. It leads to putting so-called enemy aliens in concentration camps. I don’t think it’s a ridiculous proposition,” Ngai said. “We should be very, very concerned.”
