Last year, several U.S. states—most publicly, Florida—passed laws that severely restrict Chinese nationals’ ability to buy property. More than a dozen states are debating similar laws that target individuals from China and, in some cases, other countries such as Iran and Syria. Proponents of these laws have argued that this legislation is a way to fight China’s threat to the United States. As Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis put it at a Republican presidential primary debate in December, “I banned China from buying land in the state of Florida.”
Last year, several U.S. states—most publicly, Florida—passed laws that severely restrict Chinese nationals’ ability to buy property. More than a dozen states are debating similar laws that target individuals from China and, in some cases, other countries such as Iran and Syria. Proponents of these laws have argued that this legislation is a way to fight China’s threat to the United States. As Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis put it at a Republican presidential primary debate in December, “I banned China from buying land in the state of Florida.”
The wave of legislation harks back to the days when the United States embraced widespread legal discrimination against East Asian people. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned all immigration of Chinese laborers to the United States for a decade; the alien land laws, a series of 19th- and 20th-century laws, limited land ownership in more than a dozen U.S. states by immigrants from certain countries—primarily China and Japan. The acts’ proponents claimed that the laws would protect white workers from competition, but the real motivation was racism. Essentially, lawmakers used discrimination to manufacture a geopolitical threat.
Yet while the new laws evoke the anti-Asian racism of a century ago, lawmakers are looking to another era for legal justification: the post-9/11 security apparatus. The so-called war on terror made national security concerns an easy way to fold bigotry into public policy. Over the past two decades, Washington has discriminated against Muslims under the guise of security, culminating in then-President Donald Trump’s 2017 travel ban that targeted Muslim-majority countries for what his administration claimed was the “security and welfare of the United States.”
Now, states are citing “national security interests” as the legal basis for their anti-Chinese laws. In Florida, DeSantis said the state was “taking action to stand against the United States’ greatest geopolitical threat—the Chinese Communist Party.” The bill bars people who are “domiciled” in China from buying property or agricultural land in most of the state, with one primary exception: Individuals who hold non-tourist visas can purchase one residential property on less than two acres if it’s farther than five miles from military installations or “critical infrastructure.” Chinese nationals who own property in Florida must also register promptly with the state’s Commerce Department or face strict penalties.
Most alien land laws were ruled unconstitutional more than 70 years ago, around the time Sei Fujii v. State of California overturned the California Alien Land Law, which had barred Asian immigrants—mostly Japanese—from owning agricultural land. In the ruling, the California Supreme Court stated: “There can be no question that the rights to acquire, enjoy, own and dispose of property are ‘among the civil rights intended to be protected from discriminatory state action by the Fourteenth Amendment’”—which guarantees equal protection to all people under U.S. law—“and that the power of a state to regulate the use and ownership of land must be exercised subject to the controls and limitations of that amendment.”
A similar appeal to the 14th Amendment, however, did not stop Trump’s travel ban. When the Trump administration announced executive orders to prohibit travel from Muslim-majority nations, U.S. states and civil society organizations challenged them, arguing that the bans violated the 14th Amendment in addition to other laws. Although multiple court battles ensued, the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Trump v. Hawaii upheld the ban as legal and nondiscriminatory. Chief Justice John Roberts concluded that the Trump administration had shown “sufficient national security justification.”
This decision set a dangerous precedent. The ruling gave license to Trump—and future presidents—to take the original travel ban that affected seven Muslim-majority countries and expand it. This has already happened. In the wake of Trump v. Hawaii, the Trump administration restricted travel to six additional countries (including a number of African nations), limited options for refugees and asylum-seekers, and suspended entry of immigrants who “financially burden the United States healthcare system,” all under the guise of protecting the nation.
To be clear, it is not imprudent for Washington to monitor foreign entities and geopolitical rivals. Some individuals engaging in some activities will naturally be subject to greater scrutiny—for example, a Russian national studying a sensitive field, such as aerospace engineering, or a Chinese businessperson investing in a critical infrastructure sector. But the vast majority of immigrants, foreign students, and foreign workers in the United States are normal people attempting to live normal lives. State politicians should not be allowed to use national security concerns that curtail those people’s liberties for their own political gain.
The good news is that these laws are already facing stiff resistance. Local opposition narrowly blocked a similar bill in Texas. In Congress, Reps. Judy Chu and Al Green are pushing for a federal anti-discrimination bill that would preempt these state laws. Plaintiffs represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and its partner organizations, including the Chinese American Legal Defense Alliance, have filed a lawsuit against Florida, arguing that its law codifies housing discrimination against individuals of Asian descent in violation of the federal Fair Housing Act and the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. The Justice Department, meanwhile, has said Florida’s law is unconstitutional and filed a statement of interest in the district court in Tallahassee, Florida, in support of the ACLU motion.
Although a federal judge rejected in August a request to block Florida’s law while the case moves through the courts, it seems unlikely that these state laws will hold up with so much legal precedent against them. But the laws don’t need to be upheld to be dangerous. Defeating them in court won’t end the prospect of state and local authorities, as well as other institutions in U.S. society, discriminating against certain nationalities in the name of security.
Students and academics are the canary in the coal mine. In recent years, a growing number of Chinese scholars have left the United States due to surveillance and scrutiny of the kind that Iranian academics and students have endured for years. The 2011 Wolf Amendment, which effectively banned scientific cooperation between U.S. federal agencies and Chinese institutions, was followed by the China Initiative, a Trump-era program to prosecute Chinese spies that targeted scholars of Chinese origin before the Justice Department ended it in 2022. Civil rights groups, activists, and politicians had criticized the initiative for fueling anti-Asian hate.
Even if they’re overturned, the new laws threaten to provoke even worse discrimination against East Asians across the country. Americans with Arabic names have had difficulty banking for years, facing frozen accounts, closed credit cards, and denied transactions; how long until a birthday check from one’s grandmother in Guangzhou results in similar issues? As Patrick Toomey, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, and Clay Zhu, co-founder of the Chinese American Legal Defense Alliance, wrote in Time magazine, DeSantis “is wrongly equating Chinese people with the Chinese government.” Florida’s law, they continued, “will also put a burden of suspicion on anyone with a name that sounds vaguely Asian … perpetuating racist stereotypes even more.” This is especially harmful after the dramatic spike in anti-Asian racism and hate crimes in recent years as Chinese Americans and Asian Americans were scapegoated for the COVID-19 pandemic.
There are lessons to be learned from the past 20 years of mobilization against post-9/11 Islamophobic policies. Namely, the struggle against anti-Chinese and anti-Asian legal discrimination will be a marathon, not a sprint. As Asian American groups and their allies continue to protest the spate of laws, activists and rights organizations should also be vigilant about future policies.
Trump’s travel ban, of course, was not the first government move against Muslims. It followed policies such as the George W. Bush-era National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, known as NSEERS, which forced men from 25 countries—all but one majority Muslim—to register with the U.S. government and regularly check in with immigration authorities. Even if ruled unconstitutional, the new state laws will likely return in a modified form.
Policymakers’ concern for the multicultural social fabric of the United States needs to be commensurate with their concern for national security. When they propose new security procedures, screenings, or sanctions, they must also consider how these policies could harm immigrant communities and create dangerous precedents. National security should not be used to greenlight discrimination. Policies that cast entire communities as a potential fifth column cannot protect a nation of immigrants.
