Earlier this year, Fort Lauderdale resident Yulin Wu’s white co-workers told her not to worry about a Florida bill that would prohibit some Chinese people and entities from acquiring real estate. She had heard about the proposed legislation on Chinese-language social media.
Those colleagues called it “impossible”, said Wu, a 27-year-old attorney from China’s Zhejiang province. “They [didn’t] believe this type of law can pass.”
On 8 May, Governor Ron DeSantis signed SB 264 into law, a measure that bars almost all property ownership for people or entities from various “countries of concern” including China, Cuba, North Korea and Russia. Under the law, they can’t buy property with some exceptions; individuals who hold a non-tourist visa or have been granted asylum can buy a residence of less than 2 acres (0.8 hectares) if it is at least 5 miles (8km) away from a military base or “critical infrastructure”. The law singles out Chinese people with higher penalties for violation, but it does not apply to those who are naturalized US citizens or who have legal permanent “green card” residency.
Wu said: “I don’t understand why this law passed. It definitely changed my feelings about Florida and the United States. I’m not welcome here.”
That sentiment is echoed by many Chinese residents in the US as laws banning foreign property purchases, most targeting Chinese people, have proliferated around the nation. According to the advocacy group APA Justice, 33 states have proposed or enacted similar bans against ownership of real estate by people of specific national origins. As legislators have revised their bills to address arguments that they are bigoted, some have added exceptions for lawful permanent residents who hold green cards.
Many Chinese residents in the United States, like Wu, are alarmed by this latest anti-Chinese development, and some are becoming activists.
Wu, the first in her family to attend college, spoke to the Guardian via phone while visiting New York City. She’s now mulling a move there. She had decided to become an attorney from watching American TV lawyer shows, such as Suits, and eventually earned degrees in law and finance from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. She settled in Florida just two years ago, passed the bar exam and landed a job. She picked the state even though she and two friends, also Chinese, were harassed by a stranger on a Miami street who blamed them for Covid-19 during a spring break visit.
Wu bought a townhome as an investment property just before Florida’s SB 264 was passed, and she wonders now whether she will be forced to sell it. The land of anyone who buys or sells property in violation of the law could be seized by the government.
Even though the bill targets people from multiple nations, the statute imposes harsher punishments for Chinese people. In any transaction with a “foreign principal of China”, the Chinese buyer could face five years in prison and $5,000 in fines; the seller could get a one-year sentence and a $1,000 fine.
Wu’s townhome is located near an airport, and she’s unsure whether such an area is off-limits under the law.
Gabriel Chin, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, said this latest trend follows a long history of “alien land laws”. Many federal and state laws used the phrase “aliens ineligible to citizenship”. That was a euphemism, referring to Asians legally entitled to remain in the nation but forbidden to become citizens because they were not white, until a 1952 reform. For example, the 1859 Oregon state constitution protected “white foreigners” who wished to acquire property but prohibited any “Chinaman”.
Florida’s alien land law was only repealed in 2018, making it the last state to do so. Chin led his students in an effort to undo similar laws that remained on the books.
“In Florida, it took a very long time,” he said. “We brought this to the attention of the Florida legislature in 2001,” but “it was a very tricky problem because the [ineligible aliens] provision was in the Florida constitution.”
In regards to the new law, Chin added: “It would be one thing for Florida to provide that only citizens could own land. But for them to pick and choose among favored and disfavored groups is problematic.”
He believes that the law will be ruled void due to the state’s own equal protection principles. The American Civil Liberties Union has already filed suit against the Florida policy. It argues the law violates the federal constitution’s equal protection clause and the Fair Housing Act, and that US citizens who may be mistaken for foreigners will encounter discrimination. The US Department of Justice recently joined the litigation.
At an 18 July court hearing in which a judge considered blocking the law, Chinese Americans demonstrated, some traveling from around the country.
Zhengfei Guan is a University of Florida professor who has organized protests against the new law. He immigrated to the US in 2006 because he believed “America was the beacon of the world, so many people wanted to come … and now that beacon has collapsed.”
He noted that recently, “My daughter was asking, ‘Can we move?’” The 17-year-old, who is a US citizen, fears the increasingly hostile environment for people of Asian descent. An agricultural economist whose research on citrus crops is intended to protect one of Florida’s largest industries from what he called “unfair competition”, Guan feels the changes.
He and Wu, the Fort Lauderdale lawyer, see the Florida measure as one component of the Chinese-US conflict, along with a trade war, accusations about the origins of Covid and violent attacks on Asian people. According to Guan, he and fellow Chinese academics have been adversely affected by China-fighting rhetoric and professional discrimination through the US justice department’s “China Initiative”. Discontinued last year, that federal effort investigated researchers under the theory that spies in unconventional places were sharing valuable intelligence data with Beijing. Even though Florida would allow Guan’s children, as citizens, to buy a house there, he perceives the property ban as part of a pattern of bias.
While such programs and DeSantis’s law presume that ethnicity means loyalty to another nation, the Pew Research Center recently released a study showing that more than a third of ethnic Chinese in the United States hold negative opinions about China. The longer that ethnic Chinese are in the United States, the more likely they are to have such attitudes against China. According to the 2020 census, there are about 5.4 million Chinese Americans, a majority of them foreign-born but naturalized as citizens.
This new batch of alien land laws has sparked confusion and thoughts of relocation, but also coalition building across the nation. Steven Pei, a Taiwanese immigrant and electrical engineering professor in Houston, flew to Tallahassee for last week’s court proceeding. Although naturalized, he observed: “Nobody can tell if I am a citizen or not. I have to prove it?”
Pei credited Black politicians, especially US Representative Al Green of Texas, for key support in defeating that state’s version of an alien land law in May. Pei said: “He organized the major rallies here … and what really touched me is he has been meeting [ethnic] leaders every Saturday since March.” Green encouraged the formation of a new non-partisan Multicultural Advocacy Coalition that Pei said includes African Americans and Latinos alongside Asian Americans.
Green himself said: “I’m concerned we not discriminate based on where you are from.” Recalling segregated facilities and having to step off the sidewalk if a white person were approaching during Jim Crow, he added: “I was unfortunate enough to be born a son of the segregated south. I know what discrimination is like. There are many things I lived through I would not want us to return to.”
• This article was amended on 26 July 2023 to correct a reporting error misstating the birthplace of the 17-year-old quoted in the story.
