In recent years, the United States has revived a form of land-based nationalism that turns diffuse anxieties over foreign influence, especially from China, into sweeping legislative and administrative action. Since Just Security first spotlighted new “alien land laws,” state and federal lawmakers, think tanks, and industry groups have increasingly coordinated to cast land ownership as a national security flashpoint. Federal initiatives like the National Farm Security Action Plan (NFSAP), bills like the Not One More Inch or Acre Act (S.176), and the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) model land law legislation for states all advance the same misguided narrative: foreign ownership of farmland poses a looming threat to American safety and prosperity.
Courts are now the last line of defense against these policies. Florida’s Senate Bill 264 and Texas’ Senate Bill 17 restrict purchasing and ownership of certain property — including farmland and some residential property — based on where an individual is legally domiciled and, in Florida’s case, specifically includes Chinese citizens. These bills are facing legal challenges that could determine whether key restrictions are upheld or struck down. In Shen v. Simpson, the Eleventh Circuit allowed Florida’s core provisions to remain intact, primarily citing lack of standing. A separate challenge, National Fair Housing Alliance, Inc. v. Kelly, also addresses these restrictions and is still pending before a federal court in Florida. In Wang v. Texas, the Fifth Circuit considered a challenge to Senate Bill 17, affirming the lower court’s conclusion that the plaintiffs lacked standing. A separate challenge was dismissed by a federal district court in Texas and is currently pending appeal in the Fifth Circuit. Since 2021, 43 state legislatures have introduced over 300 similar bills, indicating the potential for further legal challenges.
This rush to restrict land ownership isn’t just about geopolitics — it’s part of a longer history of using land policy to marginalize Asian communities stemming from the 19th and 20th centuries. Limiting access to, or outright restricting, land and property ownership illustrates longstanding forms of racial discrimination that simultaneously value and fear Asian-identified people in the United States for their labor and economic contributions. Imbued with perceptions of Asians as unassimilable “alien” or “agent,” state and federal legislation aimed at limiting and restricting the threat of foreign access to U.S. lands are explicitly anti-Asian, and even more so, anti-Chinese. By framing ownership as a potential threat and using language like “alien” or “agent,” these policies reinforce structural and social marginalization, while heightening the risk of real-world violence against Asian American communities.
Histories of Discriminatory Land Laws
Current discriminatory land policies mirror the sentiments of 19th and 20th century land laws that legally and culturally characterized Asians as “aliens.” In the period of Asian exclusion (1875-1952), which was categorized by legislation such as the Page Law, Chinese Exclusion Acts, and the Immigration Act of 1907, 15 states passed land laws specifically targeting “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” a legal categorization only attributed to Asians thanks to racial classifications outlined in U.S. naturalization policies and the Immigration Act of 1917.
In making Asians alien, both legally and in popular conception, land laws maintained the priorities of white settlement and eliminated perceived economic threats in the name of securing American agriculture. These policies explicitly targeted Asians’ perceived control over industrial and agricultural economies, especially on the West Coast, where Chinese and Japanese farmers accounted for a majority of the agricultural workforce at various points during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These policies also took advantage of pervasive “yellow peril” stereotypes that believed Asians could not assimilate into mainstream white American society.
New “Alien” Land Laws
Modern land laws continue this pattern, despite foreign farmland ownership statistics illustrating differently. According to the 2023 U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Annual Report, “China,” understood as a national entity, owns land in 30 states and territories, totaling 277,336 acres and a purchase value of over $1 billion. This report, however, failed to acknowledge that the farmlands attributed to individuals and entities affiliated with China account for approximately .03 percent of total U.S. farmlands (880,100,848 acres in 2022) or roughly .6 percent of the total acres (46 million acres) owned by foreign entities.
By contrast, the top five nations representing individuals or entities owning agricultural lands in the United States are Canada (33 percent of the total foreign ownership or 15.3 million acres), the Netherlands (11 percent), Italy (6 percent), the United Kingdom (6 percent), and Germany (5 percent). These nations have no restrictions under the currently enacted legislation. Moreover, the 1,297,303 acres of farmland owned by U.S. investors in Australia, as well as the United States’ foreign direct investments in food processing in Mexico, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina, rarely draw the same critiques.
The figures reported by the 2023 USDA Annual Report are often used in federal policy to prevent certain individuals (often referred to as “agents”) from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and other designated nations, such as Iran, Russia, and North Korea, from purchasing land. The U.S. Foreign Agricultural Investments Interactive Map, which was created by the USDA based on their 2023 report, attributes Russian individuals and entities to only 11 acres of agricultural land for a total purchase value of $0 as of 2023, Iranian individuals and entities to 3,000 acres, and contains no data on lands owned by North Korean individuals or entities. Naming China and North Korea — two of the four designated “adversarial countries” — demonstrates how current policies regulating land purchasing are directly anti-Asian. “Strengthening the security and resilience of U.S. food and agriculture” from foreign threats — coded as ‘alien’ threats — galvanizes restrictions on Asian-identified persons by connecting their access to land ownership to an invasion of American farmland.
Federalizing the Panic with the NFSAP & NDAA
The federal government’s NFSAP and recent efforts to amend language in the FY26 NDAA illustrates how longstanding national security rhetoric is being repurposed to police agricultural space and foreign landownership.
Issued on July 8, 2025, the NFSAP explicitly directs the USDA to “end the direct or indirect purchase or control of American farmland by nationals from countries of concern or other foreign adversaries.” To “Make Agriculture Great Again,” as the policy claims, necessitates the protection of borders, enhanced farm safety net, and domestic agricultural production, from foreign adversaries, specifically the “Chinese” as evidenced through an included chart illustrating U.S. counties with “Chinese owned farmlands.” Despite no documented large-scale attacks on U.S. infrastructure, the NFSAP evokes fear surrounding American agriculture processes and products to justify the federal government’s defense of agricultural industries.
By linking agricultural production to economic and national prosperity, the NFSAP binds the current administration’s commitment to “America First” as a means to reduce dependencies on foreign labor in agricultural sectors, identify “non-adversarial partners” to work with when domestic production is available, and to end foreign influence on federal, state, and local policymakers with respect to purchase of U.S. farmlands and business dealings. While proposed language to the NDAA labels other “foreign adversary” nations, including Iran, North Korea, and Russia, China receives significant attention, despite the report affirming that Chinese investors own less than half a percentage of total agricultural land.
As a result, federal lawmakers increasingly frame farmland ownership through the lens of national security, a domain typically reserved for federal authority, through must-pass vehicles like the NDAA. For example, efforts to insert language into the FY25 NDAA and, most recently, the FY26 NDAA attempted to prohibit “agents” from the PRC and other designated nations, from purchasing covered land, sometimes defined as land used in agriculture or land “close in proximity” to national security structures and federal government property. While the Chinese government undoubtedly engages in malign activities against the U.S. digital and telecommunications infrastructure, these threats are distinct from individual, civilian land ownership. Broad land restrictions do not mitigate these risks, which are better addressed through strengthened cybersecurity, targeted transaction review and enforcement, and CFIUS oversight where appropriate. Indeed, some experts argue that CFIUS’s existing authority over foreign investment review raises federal preemption concerns over state-level land laws, a vulnerability that could shape ongoing litigation. This current approach, however, continues to tie land ownership to racialized notions of threat and loyalty and casts suspicion on Asian-identified persons in the United States.
Consequences of Alienating Asian American Communities
As evidenced by the passage of new “alien” land laws, agricultural ownership associated with individuals and entities related to China points to ongoing racial stereotypes rooted in the concern of the economic capacities of Asians in the United States and their perceived inability to assimilate, thus maintaining their treatment as perpetual “aliens” or “agents” of their national governments. This dynamic intensifies when viewed alongside China’s agricultural and economic ascent and the rapid growth of Asian American communities in the 21st century.
The conflation of all Asians in the United States as possible adversarial “agents,” puts Asian Americans at risk of retaliation and further restriction, regardless of ethnic/national origins or legal status. For instance, the aforementioned 2023 USDA Annual Report also indicated the possibility that companies with investors from multiple countries or multi-country investment groups may lead to, “China’s interest [being] underrepresented.” This language enables broad assumptions about the purchasing power of land owners of Chinese descent and access to the nation, which strengthens the process of legal alienation. Failing to consider the many categories of lawful status, including Asian refugees and asylum seekers and temporary residents, such as H-1B visa holders, maintains monolithic understandings of Asian immigration and Asian American communities.
Asian American advocacy groups, including Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC, correctly call attention to the broad applicability and potential to fuel discriminatory bias through the inclusion of the term “agent” in land law legislation. These policies weaponize use of “agent” language in land laws to cast all Asian-identified individuals, especially those perceived as Chinese, as potential operatives of the Chinese Communist Party. Coupled with the consideration of the varied enforcement of these land restriction policies, such as mandatory reporting or signing of affidavits to prove status, as well as the common practice of buyer screening by real estate companies, could create additional hurdles or trigger scrutiny for Asian Americans buyers. Further, the connection between the existing racial prejudices and the purchase of American farmlands by Asian-identified peoples becomes evident in the context of recent anti-Asian sentiments in the United States. These include fears of Chinese health and cleanliness (e.g., COVID-19 as the “kung flu”) and access to personal data, such as through the use of Chinese-based companies like TikTok.
Conclusion
With the 1943 Magnuson Act, the United States sought to strengthen its relationship with China by repealing the Chinese Exclusion Act and allowing Chinese people in the United States to apply for citizenship. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 further removed barriers to naturalization and citizenship for all other Asians, effectively ending the legal categorization of Asians as “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” With these changes, many states overturned, repealed, or declared unconstitutional their alien land laws. Tensions regarding Asian Americans’ economic power persisted throughout the late 20th century but did not result in legislative restrictions on property ownership.
China’s increased global presence in the 21st century and the COVID-19 pandemic, however, revived a national panic directed toward Asian-identified people, which has spurred a new slew of discriminatory land laws. No longer able to rely on the status of “alien ineligible for citizenship,” anti-Asian actors instead focus on alienating Asians, especially Chinese Americans by enacting legislation to prevent and restrict land ownership. These policies potentially conflate all Asians in the United States as “Chinese,” regardless of their legal status, and simultaneously dictate appropriate spaces for Asians in the United States to live and work.
The data, however, demonstrates little evidence to support the sentiments undergirding today’s “alien” land laws with Chinese individuals and entities owning less than a percent of the total foreign-owned farmlands in the United States. Despite these insignificant numbers, the past five years have seen disproportionate concerns about Chinese ownership of U.S. farmlands and, consequently, access to the nation’s food supply, security networks, and/or military.
Knowing the historical and contemporary contexts that deem Asians as perpetually foreign “aliens” or unassimilable “agents” reveals how even facially neutral policies can be imbued with anti-Asian sentiments. Predictably, advocates against anti-Asian policies should prepare to address state and federal legislation that connects Asians to national threats, even if the language does not explicitly mention Asians or Asian nations as understanding the roots of these perceptions is vital to combating Asian American discrimination.
Donna Doan Anderson is a research assistant professor in History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Joanna YangQing Derman is the Director of Anti-Profiling, National Security, and Civil Rights at Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC. AAJC is a party to litigation challenging Florida’s SB 264. The views expressed are those of the authors.
