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From Chinese Exclusion to Japanese Internment, an excerpt from "No Right to Own: The Early Twentieth-Century Alien Land Laws as a Prelude to Internment" by Keith Aoki
40 B.C. L. Rev. 37 (1998-1999)
From the article:
"This Article recounts briefly the history and effects of the "Alien Land Laws" enacted in western states in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. These laws linked the virulent nineteenth century Sinophobia that culminated in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act with the mass internment of Japanese Americans in the mid-twentieth century. Initially, these laws barred "aliens ineligible to citizenship" from owning fee simple title in agricultural land and prohibited leases for such land lasting longer than three years. Ultimately, the ownership bar expanded to include all "real property," a term broad enough to encompass sharecropping contracts and shares of stock in corporations owning agricultural land as legally cognizable interests in land, and therefore, off-limits to alien ownership.
"The salient point of these laws was their strongly racialist basis -- "aliens ineligible to citizenship" was a disingenuous euphemism designed to disguise the fact that the targets of such laws were first-generation Japanese immigrants, or "Issei." The objective of these laws was to prevent racialized "others," (who were also foreigners) -- nonwhite Japanese barred from naturalized U.S. citizenship -- from asserting the "right to own," a fundamental stick in the proverbial "bundle of sticks" U.S. property regime, and related sticks such as the "right to rent" and the "right to devise" property by bequest.
"These laws were driven in large part by a xenophobic paranoia that John Higham has called "racial nativism." This "racial nativism" depended upon the existence in the popular U.S. imagination of a racial "link" between the reviled Chinese immigrants of the nineteenth century and Japanese immigrants of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This link partially erased a specific nationality of these immigrants, conflating a generalized Asiatic "foreign-ness" marked by racial difference.
Recommended: The full article can be downloaded from: https://lira.bc.edu/work/ns/5e1af0dd-bd87-4572-bf9a-c9204de5bfe8
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