Alien land laws

Definition: Laws of individual states that limited land ownership by noncitizens, particularly Asian immigrants

Significance: Targeting mainly Asian immigrants, the alien land laws demonstrated an anti-immigrant hysteria in a nation that prided itself on the welcome it extended to immigrants. The discriminatory laws were upheld by the courts into the 1940s.

The United States of America, even before it became independent from Great Britain, has always had an ambivalent attitude toward immigrants. Despite priding themselves on being a nation of immigrants, Americans have a long history of voicing wariness and resentment, if not outright hatred, of new immigrants entering the country, arguing that they are not as worthy of becoming Americans as those who have already arrived. This xenophobia was one of the driving forces behind a number of state laws that were enacted in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to prevent noncitizens—especially those who, because of their place of origin, were not permitted to become citizens—from owning land.

Early Laws

Some of the earliest alien land laws were passed in California, which, when it revised its state constitution in 1879, included an article that limited the right of noncitizens to own land to those noncitizens who were "of the white race or of African descent" and were "eligible to become citizens of the United States under the naturalization laws thereof." This language was directed primarily against Asians, who were excluded from naturalization under the Naturalization Act of 1870. Many local California jurisdictions passed ordinances to the same effect, both before and after the revision, and eventually, in 1913, the state government did as well.

These laws were not the only manifestation of discrimination against Asian people. Anti-Asian sentiment was pervasive at the time, especially in the western states, which in the mid-nineteenth century saw an influx of Chinese immigrants who came to California searching for gold or, later, to work on the transcontinental railroad. A number of laws were passed that were not explicitly targeted at Chinese immigrants but were used to discriminate against them in practice. One such law banned laundries from operating in wooden buildings without permits; it discriminated against Chinese laundry owners, who generally could not afford brick buildings, and the government officials who issued the permits granted them to virtually all white applicants while denying them to virtually all Chinese applicants. (The US Supreme Court declared this practice illegal in 1886, in Yick Wo v. Hopkins.) After the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, employers searching for cheap labor began recruiting Japanese immigrants instead, who quickly became the targets of discriminatory attitudes as well.

In 1913, the state of California passed its Alien Land Law, which forbade those who were not American citizens and were not eligible for citizenship from owning agricultural land. The law was targeted at Asians, who constituted the only major category of immigrants in the state who were not eligible for citizenship under federal law; because immigrants from Europe and Africa could become citizens, the law did not affect them. (Not until the 1950s would the US government revamp its naturalization policy to remove racial restrictions on who could become citizens, and even then a quota system based on country of origin remained in place until 1965.) California’s law did not conflict with a 1911 US treaty with Japan that protected the right of Japanese immigrants to own commercial land in the United States, as it covered only agricultural land.

In 1920, California passed a new Alien Land Law that made the restrictions of the 1913 law even more stringent. Up to that time, many Asian immigrants had circumvented California’s land law by purchasing agricultural land in the names of their American-born children, who were US citizens by right of birth, and making themselves the managers of the land. The 1920 law required all persons purchasing land in someone else’s name to prove they were not doing so to circumvent the terms of the 1913 law. It law also prohibited naming as trustees persons ineligible for citizenship and effectively reversed the traditional burden of proof, requiring people to prove themselves innocent. Two years later, California’s state supreme court struck down the law’s provision on trusteeship. In 1948, the US Supreme Court struck down the law’s burden-of-proof provisions in Oyama v. California, holding that they violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because they treated noncitizens differently. However, the 1913 law remained in effect.

California was not the only US state to enact alien land laws. Other states that added or modified such laws and provisions during the 1920s included Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington. During World War II, anti-Japanese fervor caused Arkansas, Utah, and Wyoming to enact such laws. Most of these states’ laws remained in effect until at least the 1950s.

End of the Laws

California’s alien land laws were finally invalidated in 1952, when the state supreme court struck them down in Sei Fujii v. State of California for violating the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. The California court was initially considering a claim by an immigrant named Sei Fujii that California’s alien land laws violated the human rights provisions of the United Nations (UN) Charter, which, ironically, had been drafted in San Francisco. California’s supreme court held that the charter’s human rights provisions were not self-executing, and because neither the state of California nor the federal government had acted to implement legislation to bring these provisions into effect, the charter was not in force in California. Instead, the court cited the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution to invalidate the law. However, the state legislature waited another four years before formally voting to remove the invalid statute.

Later court decisions have largely rendered unconstitutional further attempts to enact legislation discriminating against legal immigrants. However, the absence of a direct ruling from the US Supreme Court striking down such laws (Oyama struck down only the 1920 strengthening statute, not the original 1913 law) meant that laws had to either be invalidated by each state supreme court or be repealed state by state. Some states took considerable time to do that. For example, as late as 2008, the state of Florida had a ballot initiative that would have removed a constitutional provision on the matter. The provision in question allowed the legislature to forbid alien land holding. Although the provision had never been enforced, Florida voters refused to vote for its removal in 2008. Some opponents of the ballot measure argued that removal of the constitutional provision would somehow aid terrorists and illegal immigrants.

By the early twenty-first century, only four states—Florida, Kansas, New Mexico, and Wyoming—still had alien land laws on their books. The Wyoming and Kansas statutes were repealed in 2001 and 2002, respectively, and New Mexico repealed its law in 2006. Other states had already removed their own laws or had them overturned by courts. Oregon and Montana, for example, had their laws overturned by their state supreme courts during the 1940s and 1950s. Washington State required a ballot proposition to overturn its law. That measure went through three elections before it received a majority vote, even though only one state legislator publicly opposed the measure.

Bibliography

Bender, Steven W. Greasers and Gringos: Latinos, Law, and the American Imagination. New York UP, 2003.

Hing, Bill Ong. "Alien Land Act." Anti-immigration in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia, edited by Kathleen R. Arnold, vol. 1, ABC-CLIO, 2011, pp. 6–8.

Johnson, Kevin R., et al. Understanding Immigration Law. 2nd ed., LexisNexis, 2015.

Jordán, María Elena Sánchez, and Antonio Gambaro, editors. Land Law in Comparative Perspective. Kluwer Law International, 2002.

Kretsedemas, Philip. Migrants and Race in the US: Territorial Racism and the Alien/Outside. Routledge, 2014.

Pincetl, Stephanie Sabine. Transforming California: A Political History of Land Use and Development. Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.

Singer, Joseph William, et al. Property Law: Rules, Policies, and Practices. 6th ed., Wolters Kluwer Law & Business, 2014.