Story by Philip Jankowski
AUSTIN – The author behind a bill in the Texas Senate that would ban citizens of China, Iran, North Korea and Russia from owning property in Texas said she will not back away from pushing the bill after critics have called it racist and unconstitutional.
Senate Bill 147 from Brenham Republican Sen. Lois Kolkhorst has emerged as one of the more controversial proposals during this year’s legislative session. Kolkhorst’s bill as originally filed would ban citizens of those countries from owning any property in Texas.
The senator last week said she would move away from the total ban, telling a Senate committee she would amend SB 147 to include exceptions for green card holders and dual citizens. But in an interview with The Dallas Morning News, Kolkhorst said further concessions are “on the table,” after a bruising hearing in which more than 100 people spoke against the bill, the vast majority of which were Asian Americans.
“As the bill has developed, I think that we’ve tried to be better about saying you can be from any of these countries and buy a home,” said Kolkhorst, speaking of her plans to soften the bill. “You don’t even have to be here legally.”
Opposition to the bill has swirled around its focus on Chinese citizens, which critics say has stoked hate and racism against Asian Americans. Kolkhorst said that was not her intention, but she would not commit to removing individual countries from the bill.
Hialong Jin, board director of the DFW Chinese Alliance, said that the bill’s intent was racist and that any changes wouldn’t move him to support the bill.
“Discrimination is discrimination,” Jin said. “A racist bill is a racist bill.”
Kolkhorst chose the countries whose citizens she wants to ban from owning property based on a federal national intelligence threat assessment and said it builds off of legislation passed with bipartisan support during 2021′s session, though the bill she referenced did not target citizens and banned companies from those countries from purchasing critical infrastructure.
“I certainly didn’t just arbitrarily wake up and say, ‘Gosh, I want to file a bill against Russia and North Korea and Iran and China,’” Kolkhrost said.
Concerns over Chinese ownership of land in Texas spiked after lawmakers discovered that a Chinese subsidiary purchased about 140,000 acres near Laughlin Air Force Base in Val Verde County.
The four nations of focus were named as threats in a 2022 report from the Director of National Intelligence. A similar bill from Sen. Charles Perry, R- Lubbock, would ban citizens from countries listed in the DNI’s 2022 threat assessment report. That bill also faced accusations of racism during the same hearing.
The bills are among several aimed at Chinese citizens filed this session. A similar bill was also filed in the House, and other bills target social media, companies and products manufactured in China.
Gov. Greg Abbott has said he supports Kolkhorst’s bill. It was among the first to begin advancing in the Legislature, though it and Perry’s bill, Senate Bill 711, were left pending without a vote during last week’s hearing.
Jin, the board director of DFW Chinese Alliance, said the bills are the latest in a long line that have targeted Asian-American communities. Among them was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1913 Alien Land Law in California.
All were eventually overturned in courts, something Jin said would happen to SB 147 if it becomes law. He said Kolkhorst should scuttle the bill to avoid an inevitable court battle.
Kolkhorst said she believes the bill “cuts the mustard constitutionally.”
Sanford V. Levinson, constitutional law and government professor at the University of Texas-Austin, said the bill runs counter to scores of rulings and years of case law. But he said the court’s conservative makeup is unpredictable.
“Given the current Supreme Court, everything is up for grabs, but it’s hard for me to imagine that they would uphold such a law because it’s just a blunderbuss,” Levinson said.