Each week during the 2023 Kansas legislative session, we will provide Shawnee Mission area lawmakers the opportunity to share their thoughts about what is happening in the state capitol.
Below is this week’s submission from Democratic Rep. Rui Xu of Kansas House District 25, covering the northeast corner of Johnson County, including Fairway, Mission Hills, Roeland Park, Westwood, Westwood Hills and parts of Mission and Prairie Village.
May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, and while it is an opportunity for celebration, my mind has been on a series of anti-Asian pieces of legislation that have been passed throughout the country and that have been introduced in Kansas.
Introduced under the guise of opposing “foreign adversarial ownership of agricultural land,” these bills are ostensibly supposed to prevent foreign governmental ownership of domestic agricultural land.
That is probably a reasonable concern, but the language in these bills have been so broad that they could ban ALL citizens of these countries, even legal residents and refugees, from owning ANY land in the state.
A version introduced later in the Senate added a caveat that it only applied to parcels of land larger than 10 acres but left the broad definition of foreign adversary.
To add a little bit of personal color to this burgeoning nationwide story, my parents and I are Chinese immigrants who moved to the United States in 1991. They bought their first house in this country in 1996, and then we all naturalized to become US citizens in 2001.
Under the language of some of these bills, they would not have been able to buy that house and start to build wealth for five more years. Furthermore, we would all be deemed “foreign adversaries” in statute until we naturalized.
All of this is a continuation of the anti-Asian-American rhetoric that we saw throughout the pandemic. People extend a justified and appropriate wariness of the Chinese government onto Asian-Americans who live here, and we are the ones who bear the brunt of anger.
This type of rhetoric furthers the perceptions that Asian-Americans are foreign entities rather than contributing members of local communities here in Kansas and here in the United States.
It is vital that we approach this issue in a way that does not disproportionately harm Asian-Americans. We can narrowly tailor bills that prevent foreign governmental entities from owning agricultural land, sure, but let’s make sure that Asian-Americans can continue to pursue the economic and cultural opportunities that everybody else is able to enjoy.
I am very proud of my heritage and will keep fighting to make sure the community is represented in Topeka.
