Alien land laws date to the early 20th century, when thousands of Japanese immigrants came to California to build a better life. They used their agricultural knowledge do to so, eventually producing most of the state’s strawberries, snap beans, and celery in addition to nearly half its onions, tomatoes, and green peas.
White farmers and landowners identified an economic threat. In 1913, California passed the Alien Land Law, prohibiting ownership of agricultural land by people ineligible for citizenship. Given that Asian immigrants weren’t permitted to naturalize then, it was effectively the country’s first anti-Asian land law, says Robert Chang, a professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, executive director of the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality, and the Sylvia Mendez Presidential Chair for Civil Rights.
The law was infrequently used by prosecutors until World War II and the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when a raft of cases targeted people of Japanese ancestry. Still, coupled with a surge in anti-Japanese activism, the law drastically reduced Japanese-owned acreage, which peaked at nearly 75,000 acres in 1920 before declining. In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down portions of California’s law as it pertained to citizens, and it was repealed in 1956. The court didn’t rule on how the law applied to noncitizens.
In 1913, California passed the Alien Land Law, prohibiting ownership of agricultural land by people ineligible for citizenship.
Today, however, at least two dozen states—most recently Florida, Georgia, and Texas—restrict or forbid individuals, entities, and immigrants from “foreign countries of concern” from owning agricultural land, emphasizing national security. Brooke L. Rollins, the new U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) secretary, said in a recent interview that the Trump administration is interested in federal policies that would block “the Chinese purchase of our farmland.”
Many laws emerged as U.S.-China tensions flared after a suspected Chinese spy balloon was spotted over Montana in February 2023 and following claims that Chinese investors were buying farmland near U.S. military installations. The laws often mention a list of countries that include Russia, North Korea, and Iran, but their political backers have explicitly targeted Chinese nationals. Governor Ron DeSantis, for example, said Florida was taking a stand against the Chinese Communist Party.
Foreign ownership of U.S. farmland has expanded in recent years, passing 45 million acres in 2023 and accounting for about 3 percent of all farmland. That has led some farm groups to support restrictions on foreign ownership to protect domestic farmers. But, as Chang points out, that pressure is coming primarily from Canada.
A USDA report on foreign holdings of U.S. agricultural land states that Canadian investors represent 33 percent of foreign-owned land, followed by the Netherlands (11 percent), Italy (6 percent), and the United Kingdom (6 percent). Chinese entities own 277,000 acres of U.S. agricultural land, according to the USDA, accounting for less than 1 percent of all foreign-owned land. Mexico’s share of the total is also less than 1 percent, roughly on par with Japan.
Rather than being legitimate attempts to protect U.S. farmers, Chang argues that alien land laws are “entry points for further discrimination” against Asians and Asian Americans, in keeping with their history. Chang is co-counsel in a federal lawsuit challenging a law in Arkansas, where his client, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was flagged by the state’s secretary of agriculture because his company, which operates a digital data center on agricultural land, “may have significant ties to China.”
As alien land laws spread, and with the legal future still to be determined, Civil Eats spoke with Chang about the nativist origins of alien land laws, why they are ineffective in protecting U.S. farmers, and what’s at stake for immigrants, farmers, and the food system, as they proliferate.
What is the history of the recent spate of alien land laws?
There’s a long history regarding the power of either a nation or a state to restrict land ownership to citizens, with the idea that land ownership was tied to the security of a kingdom. When the United States inherited this tradition, some of the early Western territories began with a strict law that covered all aliens.
But when tensions arose as immigration from China increased—and then immigration from Japan after Chinese exclusion was put into place in 1882—a number of politicians and landowners thought the security of the state was possibly being endangered if farmland could be held by Asian immigrants. And so, in 1913, California passed what is regarded as the first [specifically] anti-Asian alien land law.
Why are these laws resurfacing now?
