This was going to be a great year for Robin Chen. After waiting for five years he had finally gotten his green card sponsored by his employer, an IT company in New York. He was planning to buy an apartment later this year and marry his girlfriend, who is currently a graduate student. “Having your own place to live, forming a family, this is the first stone of the foundation of the American dream, no?” said Chen, who lives in a rental apartment in Long Island City.
Then came the “Not One More Inch or Acre Act,” legislation introduced on January 22 in the U.S. Senate by Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), along with Senator Katie Britt (R-Alabama) and Senator Kevin Cramer (R- North Dakota). The legislation would ban all Chinese citizens from purchasing any real estate in the U.S. with the exceptions of refugees and those who have asylum.
Although Chen, a Chinese citizen, understands that even if the bill gets passed, it will take time, he said he cannot help being wary about the dark clouds now hanging over his American dream. “There is this uncertainty. You never know what’s gonna happen,” he said. “If I am not allowed to buy an apartment, I may have to reconsider whether I want to stay in this country.”
Chen is far from the only one worried about the bill. Since its introduction, it has become a topic of debate in the Chinese community. The fury it has triggered seems to be across the board in a community where political views are increasingly polarized. In New York, where Chinese voters have been leaning to the right in recent elections, concerns from conservative community activists about the bill are particularly vociferous. Their worries that such a bill would place a target on the back of all Chinese Americans by singling out Chinese citizens only and warnings that the Republicans may lose support from the Chinese community if the bill gets passed indicate that the red wave that has swept up Chinese voters is far from guaranteed to last.
Cotton’s bill is not the first legislation in the U.S. seeking to restrict Chinese citizens wishing to own properties in the U.S. According to the National Association of Realtors, Chinese citizens had the largest share of American residential properties purchased by foreigners from 2015 to 2020, and have remained in the top three since then. As for farmlands, which cause greater national security concerns among politicians who worry about food security and espionage activities on lands near military facilities, China and other “advisory countries” all together only make a 1% share of foreign ownership.
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Still, according to data closely tracked by Committee of 100, a nonprofit organization representing Chinese Americans elites, 236 bills have been proposed at a state or federal level since 2021 that would prohibit or restrict Chinese citizens from purchasing some type of property in the U.S. Among those bills, 36 have been passed in 22 states, almost all proposed by Republicans. Less than one third of the bills that have passed put all foreigners under restrictions and the rest either include several countries including China or identify China only.
Many of the proposed bills offer exemptions to green card holders or buyers of residential properties. In Congress, only one bill introduced by Cotton in 2023 sought to ban all, and only, Chinese citizens from purchasing all types of real estate in the U.S. And it failed to pass.
Cotton’s new bill is identical with his previous one. In addition to the ban on purchasing property, it would also authorize the U.S. President to force the sale of properties owned by Chinese citizens if they pose a national security risk. In a press release, the Senator expressed concern that Chinese citizens’ increasing property ownership in the U.S. has created a hotbed for espionage. “We can’t allow Chinese citizens, or anyone affiliated with the CCP, to own one more inch of American soil,” the Senator said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.
With President Trump, who coined the phrase “Chinese virus,” back in the White House and both houses of Congress controlled by the Republicans, the reincarnation of the bill set off much stronger alarm bells for Chinese living in the U.S. this time.
On WeChat, posts about the bill with eye-catching headlines like “Chinese living in the U.S. see their universe collapsing,” or “The U.S. may completely block Chinese from buying a house” have been circulating widely, many with tens of thousands of clicks. In their comments, readers compared the bill to the land reform that Mao Zedong launched in the late 1920s in areas controlled by the CCP before he led the Party to take over China. The reform encouraged armed forces to grab land from owners and redistribute it to poor peasants.
The netizens on WeChat also mocked the U.S. for being paranoid. Several vented their rage against Republicans: “Let’s keep voting for the Republicans and digging a tomb for ourselves,” one reader said sarcastically.
The sentiment is palpable in New York where close to 700,000 ethnic Chinese dwell, the highest number for any city outside Asia, and where Chinese concentrated neighborhoods are increasingly turning red in recent years. The Cotton bill would “send real estate prices in New York for a nosedive,” predicted Kevin Kang, a real estate agent at United Real Estate. “We Chinese tend to support Republicans. But I would be the first to ditch them if this bill is passed,” said Kang, who voted for President Trump last year.
The apprehension may not be overblown. “I’m sure he’ll have more capacity and opportunity to pass his legislation,” New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand told Documented. The Republicans “have a majority in the Senate and a majority in the House,” said Gillibrand. “And you know President Trump has used racist language towards Chinese Americans in the past. I think he is a receptive audience to these kinds of pieces of legislation.”
The office of Chuck Schumer, the minority leader in the Senate, didn’t reply to multiple requests for comment from Documented.
Chinese voters in New York had been largely loyal to the Democrats until 2018 when then-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s attempt to eliminate the Specialized High School Admission Test (SHSAT) sent thousands of otherwise apolitical Chinese parents onto the streets to protest. From there, these parents, mainly new immigrants worrying that their children’s chances of getting into the top public schools would be reduced without the test, started to align around conservative candidates espousing meritocracy. Several parents-turned-activists went to run for public office themselves.
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The conservative movement ignited first by these parents has been widespread in the Chinese community since. Fueled further by the concerns about public safety arising during the pandemic, the community delivered victory to Republican Mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa in close to 200 voting districts in the 2021 elections, flipped two Democratic controlled seats of the state legislature in South Brooklyn, and presented President Trump with big gains compared with 2020 in some Chinese-concentrated neighborhoods.
The Republicans have found Chinese new immigrants standing with them on almost all contentious issues from bailout reform to gender affirming care for minors. The Chinese community in New York “exemplify everything the Republican Party stands for,” said Sliwa at a recent fundraising event hosted by Chinese American Republican assemblyman Lester Chang at Trump Tower, before vowing to help the Republican Party take back the city by getting elected the Mayor this year with the help of the assemblyman.
But Cotton’s bill seems to have created a wedge between some pioneers of the Chinese conservative movement and the Republican Party. “This is already Chinese Exclusion Act 2.0,” said Donghui Zang, the head of New York City Residents Alliance, a network of thousands of Chinese parents he co-founded in 2018 that played a pivotal role in protecting the SHSAT.
Zang pointed out that like the notorious law that banned most immigrants from China from entering the U.S. for more than six decades until 1943, Cotton’s bill also singles out citizens from China. He said it would encourage discrimination against all Chinese, including American citizens. “We’ll all be labeled as suspicious people,” Zang concluded.
“Asian New Yorkers, half of them are Chinese, we have the highest home ownership,” said Yiatin Chu, a leading activist for keeping the SHSAT and a co-founder of parents advocacy organization PLACE NYC. The homeownership rate for Asians in the city is 44%, the highest among all racial groups, according to a report released by the Comptroller’s office last year. “It puts us in the crosshairs of this anti-China policy.” Chu, too, worries that the bill would trigger more discriminatory restrictions on Chinese Americans and even Asian Americans. “It’s a slippery slope,” she said.
Not all Chinese conservatives think the bill would bring back the Chinese Exclusion Act era. Sam Ni, a parent activist turned conservative blogger better known by his pen name Ling Fei, said the U.S. political system offers plenty of means for ordinary people to change the course of history by participating in the process of policy making. And compared to the 19th Century, Chinese immigrants have much stronger voices in politics today, he noted.
But Ni agreed with other conservative Chinese parents on one thing. “A bill like this would weaken Chinese voters’ support for the Republicans,” he said.
All the concerns shared by the New York Chinese community parents have materialized in Florida. After Florida’s law restricting Chinese citizens from purchasing properties went into effect in July 2023, some realtors there have stopped working with Chinese buyers altogether, despite the law exempting green card holders from the curbs.
“They’d rather decline eligible Chinese clients than take the risk of liability,” said Clay Zhu, an attorney who sued the state over the law together with civil rights organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, and Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. (The case is pending in appeals court).
Zhu said Cotton’s bill, if passed, would do greater harm. “It’s like announcing that all Chinese living in the U.S. are national security threats,” Zhu said. He added that many Chinese Americans in Florida, including his own friends, have switched from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party because of this law.
In New York, liberal Chinese activists, most of whom are U.S. born and have drifted away from working with Chinese new immigrants because of issues like affirmative action in recent years, see an opportunity for collaborative action.
Liz Ouyang, former president of the civil rights organization OCA-NY, said by now conservative new immigrants should be able to see that singling out one minority group will eventually see all minorities bearing the brunt. In particular she mentioned the ban on travellers from certain Muslim majority countries from entering the U.S. and the tirade about the “Chinese virus” in Trump’s first term and the hate crimes that ensued, the current mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and now the Cotton bill.
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“Now, do I think it poses an opportunity for Asian business people, green card holders, American born Chinese to build coalitions with other immigrant communities that are being targeted?” said Ouyang. “Absolutely yes because we are all impacted.”
That may not happen immediately though as most Chinese parent activists still think the interests of Asians have been short changed under affirmative action for the benefits of other minorities, and many see deporting undocumented immigrants as legitimate law enforcement.
But their warnings to the Republican Party are also clear. Chu, a former Democrat who switched to the GOP last year when she ran for the State Senate, said Asian voters she talked to were more turned off by the Democrats rather than wholeheartedly embracing Republicans. “There is not yet a hardened partisanship,” Chu said. And she pointed out that the mercurial loyalty could easily evaporate should something like the Cotton bill get passed. “How do you even find it defensible when it’s the party that’s attacking your heritage?” Chu said.
Yi Fang Chen, one of the parents who filed a lawsuit in 2018 against the city’s expansion of the Discovery Program, a tool to phase out SHSAT, has been voting Republican in recent years and chose Trump to be the President last year. Despite that, she said she would stop voting for the GOP should the Cotton bill get passed because she believes the aftermath of the bill would pose an existential challenge to Chinese living in the U.S. “I would like to save some tax dollars under the leadership of the Republicans, But I think compared to money, life is more valuable,” Chen said.
