History for Sale

In the spring of 2023, a woman in Florida signed a contract to build a home. She had lived in the state for years on a visa, paying taxes, employing contractors, and raising a family. Then the legislature passed a law, and by the time her house was finished she might no longer be allowed to buy it. Her situation was not hypothetical. She became one of the plaintiffs in Shen v. Simpson, the federal challenge to Florida’s Senate Bill 264, because the home she had contracted to build could become, under the new statute, a house she was barred from owning.¹

Her predicament is not an isolated one. It is the human face of a policy sweeping American statehouses. According to the Committee of 100, a nonpartisan organization of prominent Chinese Americans, 26 states have now passed 63 laws restricting foreign property ownership in some form. The pace has accelerated sharply: 17 measures became law in 2024 and 14 more in 2025. Many are narrow and defensible, aimed at foreign governments or farmland near military bases. But a significant share single out the citizens of a handful of nations, and in practice, one nation above all. Of the bills the Committee has catalogued, the great majority that name specific countries name the People’s Republic of China.²

This is not, on its face, a story about race. The statutes are written in the race-neutral language of “foreign adversaries” and “countries of concern.” That is what makes them worth examining carefully. This is precisely how their historical predecessors were written, too.

A security concern that deserves a precise answer

Begin with the strongest version of the case for these laws, because it is a real one. Land near a military installation, a power grid node, or a deepwater port is not like other land. A hostile state that controls it can surveil, disrupt, or, in wartime, sabotage. The concern that prompted many of these bills, that acquisitions by entities linked to a rival government could create vulnerabilities, is legitimate. In July 2025, the administration launched a National Farm Security Action Plan to coordinate scrutiny of farmland near sensitive sites.³

Florida’s lawyers made this point in defending SB 264. The state’s solicitor general argued that the law’s definition of “foreign principal” was aimed primarily at agents of hostile governments, not ordinary residents.⁴ A reader who dismisses that argument out of hand has not understood the problem these legislators believed they were solving.

The right question is not whether the security concern is real. It is whether a blanket ban keyed to nationality is the right tool to meet it. A law that cannot tell the difference between a graduate student and an intelligence operative, because it sorts by passport rather than by documented conduct and institutional affiliation, has answered a hard question with the easiest available proxy. The cost of that imprecision is not merely legal; it is strategic.

History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes

The history of these laws is impossible to ignore, because the country has run this experiment before. Beginning with California’s Alien Land Law of 1913, more than a dozen states barred “aliens ineligible for citizenship” from owning land.⁵ That phrase, legally neutral on its face, functioned as a racial exclusion without ever naming a race, because naturalization was then closed to Asian immigrants by design. The parallels to today are precise in four respects: the race-neutral drafting, the vague and expandable categories, the use of citizenship as a proxy for loyalty, and the early deference of courts.

Stanford historian Gordon H. Chang has argued that such laws function as “entry points for further discrimination,” noting that the original statutes arose when politicians came to see the security of the state as endangered if farmland could be held by Asian immigrants.⁶ The echo of that logic in today’s debates is unmistakable.

Intellectual honesty requires naming where the analogy breaks down. Today’s laws are police-power measures passed in peacetime, not the wartime authority that produced Japanese American internment. Most carve out U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents; the 1913 laws offered no such exits because their targets could not naturalize at all. These distinctions matter.

But they cut less cleanly than their drafters might hope. Reports have surfaced of lenders and title companies, uncertain of the rules, declining to work with Asian clients who are nowhere named in the statutes.⁷ Jamie Tian, president of the Asian Real Estate Association of America, has called these laws “reminiscent of the Chinese Exclusion Act,” noting that the penalties are specifically heavier for Chinese nationals than for nationals of any other listed country.⁸

The economic community caught in the middle

For Chinese Americans, these laws are not arriving in a vacuum. They land on top of a community that has been a foundational part of the American economic fabric for generations. A 2023 study by the Committee of 100 found that Chinese Americans contributed over $300 billion to U.S. GDP through consumer spending in 2019 alone, supporting three million jobs.⁹ The American Immigration Council found that Fortune 500 companies founded by immigrants or their children generated $8.6 trillion in revenue in 2023, a figure exceeding the GDP of Japan, Germany, or the United Kingdom.¹⁰ Nvidia, whose Chinese-born founder Jensen Huang is frequently invoked in debates about American AI competitiveness, is among them.

Yet this community already navigates what researchers call the “bamboo ceiling”: Asian Americans are well represented in the professional ranks of large U.S. employers but hold a far smaller share of executive and board seats, and remain among the racial groups least likely to be promoted into management.¹¹ What the current legislative climate adds is a geopolitical layer specific to Chinese Americans: the sense that professional standing turns not on individual performance but on a bilateral rivalry they did not choose. Survey data from the Committee of 100 and NORC at the University of Chicago found that roughly two-thirds report experiencing discrimination in an average month.¹²

The innovation cost no one is counting

The stakes extend well beyond individual careers and mortgage applications. A law restricting who may buy a house sits within a wider climate affecting who feels welcome to build a company, run a lab, or start a doctoral program. The pattern is measurable.

Wharton economist Britta Glennon and co-authors found that rising U.S.-China tensions made ethnically Chinese graduate students 16% less likely to attend American doctoral programs between 2016 and 2019, and reduced the productivity of Chinese American scientists already here.¹³ A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, summarized by the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions, found that departures of Chinese-descent scientists from the U.S. increased 75% after the China Initiative launched in 2018, with two-thirds of those relocated moving to China specifically. An estimated 20,000 scientists of Chinese descent left the U.S. between 2010 and 2021.¹⁴

Stanford’s 2026 AI Index Report found that the U.S.-China performance gap on leading AI benchmarks collapsed from between 17 and 31 percentage points in 2023 to just 2.7% as of March 2026. More consequentially, the number of AI researchers choosing to move to the United States dropped 89% since 2017, and 80% in a single year. The U.S. still leads on private AI investment, outspending China roughly 23 to one. But a spending advantage cannot substitute for a talent pipeline that is closing.¹⁵

The human cost has names attached. Haifan Lin, a distinguished Yale cell biologist, lost access to National Institutes of Health funding for two years under the now-defunct China Initiative after a question arose about how he had disclosed an academic affiliation in China. He has warned that such measures “will accelerate the breakdown of the people-to-people trust that is so important in scientific collaborations.”¹⁶ Gisela Perez Kusakawa, who leads the Asian American Scholar Forum, has told Congress that “protecting researchers from discrimination and protecting our innovation edge are not competing goals but the same goal.”¹⁷

Multiply those individual decisions by thousands. The student who accepts an offer in Toronto instead. The postdoctoral researcher who stops applying for the grant that might invite scrutiny. The family that sells early rather than risk a rule no title company can explain. None of these decisions makes headlines. Together they describe a slow attrition of exactly the people a competitive economy is supposed to attract and keep.

A more surgical approach already exists

The good news is that the United States already has precision instruments for this problem. It does not need to reach for a blunt one.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) reviews foreign transactions for national security risk, transaction by transaction, without regard to the ethnicity of the buyer. Aimen Mir, who ran that process at the Treasury Department for eight years and helped write the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2018, has described its logic: CFIUS acts only where other legal authorities are inadequate, and it seeks the narrowest mitigation that resolves the specific risk.¹⁸ That is the opposite of a categorical ban on an entire nationality of home buyers.

Beyond CFIUS, the Department of Defense publishes two annually updated lists that offer exactly the institutional precision these laws lack. The Section 1286 list identifies foreign institutions engaging in problematic research activities.¹⁹ The Section 1260H list identifies Chinese military companies operating directly or indirectly in the United States, including entities owned or controlled by the People’s Liberation Army and contributors to China’s defense industrial base.²⁰ These lists include institutions with documented PLA connections, such as Harbin Institute of Technology and the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, while excluding the vast majority of Chinese universities, companies, and individuals who have no such ties.

One state has already tried this approach. Utah’s original 2023 land ownership law anchored its restrictions to the Section 1260H list rather than to Chinese nationality.²¹ That is the right principle: a buyer affiliated with a military-linked institution presents a categorically different risk profile from a graduate student or a green card holder with no such ties. The law’s subsequent amendments unfortunately folded back into a broader nationality-based ban, but the original design points toward what a better framework could look like.

Indiana moved in a more defensible direction, tying its restrictions to the Commerce Department’s federal foreign adversary list rather than writing country names directly into state law.²² That at least defers to a federal determination and updates automatically. These are modest improvements over pure nationality bans, but they still operate at the country level rather than the institutional or individual level where real security risk analysis takes place.

What a better framework looks like

Several concrete reforms would address the genuine security concern without the discrimination risk. Taken together, they constitute a framework that is both more legally durable and more likely to catch actual threats.

Congress should extend CFIUS-style review to cover sensitive real-estate transactions at the federal level, replacing a patchwork of 30-plus state laws with a single, coherent rulebook. A law review analysis of the current statutes has noted that the poor fit between means and ends, combined with the availability of far less restrictive alternatives, leaves them both constitutionally vulnerable and practically ineffective.²³

Restrictions should be tied to documented institutional affiliation with DOD-listed entities, not to national origin. A buyer with current ties to a Section 1286- or 1260H-listed organization, applying to purchase land within a defined buffer zone around a military installation or critical infrastructure node, should face disclosure requirements and transaction review. A buyer with no such ties should not, regardless of their passport.

Geographic buffer zones around defined sensitive sites, applied equally to all foreign buyers regardless of country, accomplish much of what the current laws aim for without the ethnic proxy problem. Analysis of Louisiana’s “reasonable suspicion” enforcement language illustrates what happens when geographic limits are absent: discretion fills the gap, and a Chinese surname risks becoming the operative trigger.²⁴

Any framework should carry meaningful due-process protections so that a buyer wrongly caught by it has a defined path to challenge the determination. When Florida left terms like “domicile” undefined, community groups had to hire experts to map which land was even legally available.²⁵ That task should never fall to the people the law targets.

Finally, any law of this type should carry a mandatory sunset provision, requiring reauthorization within three years based on updated findings. That forces the evidentiary question back into the open and prevents these measures from accumulating and hardening beyond their original justification, which is precisely what the 20th-century alien land laws did for decades before courts finally reversed course.

The strategic case for getting this right

The Committee of 100’s Cindy Tsai has observed that “unnecessary and overzealous restrictions only add to the challenges faced by immigrants looking to live in and contribute to American society,” and that sweeping bans “legitimize harmful and xenophobic narratives.”²⁶ She is right, but the deeper point is strategic as much as it is moral.

A country competing with China for the world’s talent cannot afford to signal to that talent, in the language of property deeds and mortgage applications, that it is permanently suspect. Realtors and lenders are already erring toward refusal whenever a buyer sounds or looks Chinese, regardless of citizenship. That is not national security enforcement. That is discrimination operating in the gap between what a statute says and what it produces on the ground.

The last century’s alien land laws were eventually repealed and repudiated, not because a foreign adversary forced the issue, but because the country concluded that treating origin as a proxy for loyalty had served no one and cost too much. That conclusion took decades to reach. The question this generation faces is whether it can recognize the pattern early enough to choose a different path, one that takes the security concern seriously and meets it with tools equal to its actual shape.

Precision is not a weakness. It is the difference between policy that works and policy that merely looks decisive while pushing away the very people America needs to stay ahead.

Alan Chen is the Assistant Dean for Global Programs at CKGSB and is an advisor to a leading AI university in the UAE.

Mukul Pandya is the founding editor-in-chief of Knowledge@Wharton (1998-2020). He was an associate fellow at Oxford University’s Said Business School (2023-2026).

They have written previously about the challenges of Asian Americans for CKGSB Knowledge. Please see Beyond the Bamboo Celing.

Notes

1. American Civil Liberties Union, “Shen v. Simpson,” aclu.org/cases/shen-v-simpson, updated Jan. 2026.
2. Committee of 100, “Federal and State Bills Restricting Property Ownership by Foreign Entities,” committee100.org, updated 2026.
3. White House, “National Farm Security Action Plan,” July 2025. Tracked by Committee of 100 legislative database, committee100.org.
4. The Capitolist, “State of Florida Stands Behind Foreign Land Ownership Legislation,” thecapitolist.com.
5. APA Justice Task Force, “Alien Land Bills: History and Current Legislation,” apajusticetaskforce.org.
6. G.H. Chang, quoted in C. Waddell, “Alien Land Laws Created to Protect U.S. Farmland May Be Harming Asian Americans,” Civil Eats, Feb. 25, 2025, civileats.com.
7. M.H. Hu, “Chinese Property Ownership as a National Security Problem,” Lawfare, March 1, 2024, lawfaremedia.org. The author notes that Florida’s seller-penalty provision has produced a chilling effect on lenders and title companies based on interviews with attorneys representing plaintiffs.
8. J. Tian, “Fresh Challenges Face Asian American Homebuyers,” Scotsman Guide, Feb. 2026, scotsmanguide.com.
9. Committee of 100, “From Foundations to Frontiers: Chinese American Contributions to the Fabric of America,” 2023, committee100.org. The $300 billion GDP figure covers 2019 consumer spending.
10. American Immigration Council, “Immigrant Entrepreneurs and the Fortune 500: Powering the U.S. Economy in 2024,” Sept. 2024, americanimmigrationcouncil.org.
11. M. Chui, K. Ellingrud, and I. Rambachan, “Asian American Workers: Diverse Outcomes and Hidden Challenges,” McKinsey & Company, Sept. 2022, mckinsey.com. Ascend and KPMG LLP, “Tracking the State of Asian Corporate Board Representation,” April 2024, prnewswire.com/news-releases/tracking-the-state-of-asian-corporate-board-representation-a-new-report-by-ascend–kpmg-302118402.html. Committee of 100, “Asian American Career Ceilings Initiative,” ongoing series, committee100.org/our-work/asian-american-career-ceilings-initiative/. For the original workforce-to-management promotion gap finding, see also L. Zheng and N. Kass-Hout, “Asian Americans Are the Least Likely Group in the U.S. to Be Promoted Into Management,” Harvard Business Review, May 2018, hbr.org/2018/05/asian-americans-are-the-least-likely-group-in-the-u-s-to-be-promoted-into-management.
12. Committee of 100 and NORC at the University of Chicago, “State of Chinese Americans Survey,” annual series. See also Committee of 100, “Survey Findings,” committee100.org.
13. B. Glennon, E. Huang, and I. Rahwan, “Building a Wall Around Science: The Effect of U.S.-China Tensions on International Scientific Research,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 32622, June 2024. Summarized in “How Hostile U.S.-China Relations Are Hurting Science,” Knowledge@Wharton, Oct. 2024, knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu.
14. Y. Xie, X. Lin, J. Li, Q. He, and J. Huang, “Caught in the Crossfire: Fears of Chinese-American Scientists,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 120, no. 27 (2023). See also Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions, “Reverse Brain Drain? Exploring Trends Among Chinese Scientists in the U.S.,” July 2024, sccei.fsi.stanford.edu.
15. Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, “AI Index Report 2026,” April 2026. Key findings summarized in J. Vincent, “Stanford AI Index 2026: China Narrows U.S. Lead to 2.7%,” The Next Web, April 2026, thenextweb.com.
16. H. Lin, quoted in J. Kaiser, “U.S. Congress Considers Sweeping Ban on Chinese Collaborations,” Science, 2024, science.org.
17. G. Perez Kusakawa, testimony before the House Select Committee on the CCP, quoted in Democrats’ press release, democrats-selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov.
18. A. Mir, Freshfields partner and former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Investment Security, U.S. Treasury. Profile at freshfields.com. Mir served as the senior-most career CFIUS official from 2009 to 2017 and was a principal drafter of the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2018 (FIRRMA).
19. U.S. Department of Defense, “Section 1286 List of Foreign Institutions Engaging in Problematic Activities,” Fiscal Year 2025 Update, published pursuant to Section 1286 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 (Public Law 115-232), as amended.
20. U.S. Department of Defense, “Section 1260H List of Chinese Military Companies,” updated Jan. 6, 2025. Analysis at Hogan Lovells, “U.S. Department of Defense Issues Updated Section 1260H Chinese Military Companies List,” Jan. 17, 2025, hoganlovells.com.
21. National Agricultural Law Center, “Utah Enacts Law Prohibiting Certain Foreign Investments in Land,” April 2023, nationalaglawcenter.org. Utah HB 186 (2023) originally defined “restricted foreign entity” by reference to the DOD Section 1260H list. The law was subsequently amended by HB 516 (2024) and HB 430 (2025). See also National Agricultural Law Center, “Limits on Land Acquisitions: Three States Amend Their Foreign Ownership Laws,” March 2024, nationalaglawcenter.org.
22. National Agricultural Law Center, “Soil for Sale? State Legislative Efforts to Restrict Foreign Investments,” 2025, nationalaglawcenter.org. Indiana HB 1183 (2024) references the Commerce Department foreign adversary list at 15 C.F.R. Section 791.4(a).
23. A. Mitkus, “Property and Prejudice,” Southern California Law Review, April 2025, southerncalifornialawreview.com.
24. S. Kumar, “With New Alien Land Laws, Asian Immigrants Are Once Again Targeted by Real Estate Bans,” Just Security, justsecurity.org. The piece discusses Louisiana HB 537 and the risk that “reasonable suspicion” enforcement triggers scrutiny based on name or appearance.
25. California Public Radio, “Florida’s Chinese Community Calls for Reform, Repeal of Law That Limits Property Ownership,” Sept. 28, 2023, cfpublic.org.
26. C. Tsai, Committee of 100, “Committee of 100 Updates National Database Tracking Harmful Alien Land Laws Legislation,” committee100.org.